■ 

Journalism  Versus  Art 


By  MAX  EASTMAN 

ENJOYMENT  OF  POETRY 
POEMS 

UNDERSTANDING  GERMANY 
JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2014 


THE  MASK  OF  THE  RED  DEATH.  BOARDMAN  ROBINSON 

Mr.  Robinson  was  invited  by  the  Century  Magazine,  under  a  former  editor,  to  do  a  series  of  paintings  illustrating 
Edgar  Allan  Poe's  stories.  He  made  three,  and  they  were  all  rejected  because  there  was  too  much  "horror"  in  them 
for  Century  readers.  It  is  a  pity  to  reproduce  this  picture  without  color,  but  as  an  example  of  what  magazine  stand- 
ards would  do  to  art,  and  to  literature,  the  anecdote  cannot  be  passed.  Mr.  Poe  would  be  invited  to  go  home  and  take 
some  of  the  horror  out  of  his  stories,  too,  for  circulation  purposes. 


Journalism  Versus  Art 


Max  Eastman 

Editor  of  "The  Massed 
Formerly  Associate  in  Philosophy 
at  Columbia  University 


New  York  Alfred  A.  Knopf  1916 


COPYRIGHT,  1916,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF 


PRINTED  IN   THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


PREFACE 


I  dedicate  this  little  book  to  the  artists  of  The 
Masses  staff,  including  those  who  have  withdrawn 
and  those  who  are  to  come.  I  do  so  in  the  mood  of 
a  grateful  if  somewhat  obstreperous  pupil. 

In  the  autumn  of  1912  when  our  group  happened 
together  and  decided  to  bring  out  a  magazine  which 
should  publish  art  and  literature  without  any  canons 
of  good  journalism,  I  was  exceedingly  rustic  in  the 
appreciation  of  art.  And  my  rusticity  was  consid- 
erably enhanced  by  a  thorough  knowledge  of  the 
"science  of  sesthetics."  I  had  just  come  down  from 
the  oracle  on  Morningside  Heights,  where  I  had  con- 
ducted, the  previous  winter,  a  course  in  the  graduate 
school  on  the  philosophy  and  psychology  of  beauty. 
In  that  course  I  had  presented  to  my  students  some 
twenty-three  classical  definitions  of  beauty,  and  then 
proceeded  to  the  best  of  my  ability  to  annihilate 
them  all,  and  to  show  that  we  apply  the  word  beauty 
to  objects  so  widely  different  externally,  and  so  dif- 
ferent also  in  their  internal  effects  upon  our  organs, 

7 


8 


PREFACE 


that  a  true  definition  of  the  term  is  impossible.  I 
taught  that  if  we  define  the  term  beauty  as  a  name 
for  the  objectification  of  pleasures  that  we  feel  in  the 
act  of  perception,  we  shall  come  as  near  as  possible 
to  including  all  its  important  uses.  But  even  then 
we  shall  find  ourselves  exaggerating  a  distinction 
that  is  neither  clear  nor  of  profoundest  importance. 
For  impressions  that  we  quite  passively  receive  may 
be,  and  are,  called  beautiful,  and  there  is  no  reason 
in  health  or  morals  why  they  should  not  be. 

Indeed  the  question  whether  we  can  define  beauty, 
is  secondary  to  the  question  whether  it  is  important 
for  us  to  do  so.  And  it  was  my  contention  in  those 
lectures,  that  in  making  so  much  of  an  alleged  dis- 
tinction between  sesthetic  values  and  other  immedi- 
ate values,  such  as  the  pleasures  of  poignant  reality, 
of  taste  and  touch  and  physical  experiences,  the  phil- 
osophers had  put  the  whole  cultivated  world  off  on  a 
false  track.  The  important  distinction  for  us  to 
remember  and  refine  and  philosophize  about,  is  the 
distinction  between  all  the  immediate  values,  which 
have  their  certification  in  themselves,  and  those  me- 
diate, or  moral,  or  practical  values  which  look  to 
some  ulterior  benefit  to  certify  them.  It  seemed  to 
me  that  if  the  English  language  were  wise,  it  would 
contain  a  very  eminent  word  (not  altogether  unlike 


PREFACE 


9 


beauty,  although  less  aristocratic)  to  express  the 
whole  range  of  things  which  are  good  simply  because 
they  are  chosen.  And  among  these  things  we  should 
often  find  objects  distinctly  unbeautiful,  and  even 
unpleasant,  because  life  has  a  thirst  after  experience 
which  is  very  general,  and  is  willing  to  suffer  a  good 
deal  of  pain  for  the  sake  of  tasting  its  reality. 

This  was  the  philosophy  of  sesthetics  at  which  I 
had  abstractly  arrived  when  I  was  elected,  upon 
quite  other  grounds,  to  become  the  editor  and  general 
care-taker  of  a  magazine  whose  pictorial  destinies 
were  to  be  jealously  watched  over  by  a  group  of 
"revolutionary"  artists.  It  was  a  philosophy  which 
did  not  seriously  unfit  me  for  that  responsible  honor, 
because  it  was  so  largely  a  mere  liberation  from  un- 
fruitful definitions.  But  still  it  was  a  philosophy, 
and  I  am  sure  that  if  I  had  been  suspected  of  possess- 
ing such  a  thing,  or  of  harboring  however  darkly  in 
my  memory  twenty-three  definitions  of  beauty,  I 
would  never  have  been  elevated  to  that  precarious 
post.  It  was  as  a  simple  rustic,  acquainted  only 
with  some  small  matters  of  politics  and  literature, 
that  I  was  designated  by  these  artists  to  see  that  the 
spaces  between  their  pictures  were  filled  in  with  ade- 
quately revolutionary  reading  matter. 

And  for  that  I  am  glad,  because  it  put  me  in  a 


lO 


PREFACE 


rather  humble  mood,  and  enabled  me  to  receive  at 
their  hands  a  very  liberal  education  in  the  apprecia- 
tion of  art.  I  have  learned  to  perceive  a  great  many 
qualities  in  pictures  that  I  might  never  have  known 
to  exist,  and  to  discriminate  one  quality  from  another 
as  I  could  never  have  done  except  through  the  mi- 
croscope of  the  artist's  extreme  love  of  his  art.  And 
my  reason  for  dedicating  this  book  to  those  artists  is 
that,  without  the  refining  of  my  perceptions  which  a 
friendly  association  with  them  has  accomplished,  I 
should  never  have  ventured  to  come  down  from  that 
abstract  "philosophy  of  aesthetics,"  as  I  have  in  this 
essay  on  magazine  art,  and  enter  the  field  of  concrete 
judgments.  I  think  I  may  say  that  this  essay  re- 
flects the  feeling,  and  in  some  places  even  the 
thought  and  language  of  the  artists  of  The  Masses^ 
in  criticizing  the  art  of  the  popular  commercial  maga- 
zine. I  need  not  apologize,  therefore,  if  I  have 
taken  for  illustrations  of  a  more  various  and  freer 
art  pictures  most  of  which  have  been  drawn  by  these 
artists  for  The  Masses.  This  does  not  imply  that 
our  magazine  itself  intends  to  be  an  academy,  or  re- 
gards itself  as  grown  up  and  arrived  at  any  exclu- 
siveness.  But  it  does  imply  that  our  magazine  is  the 
only  illustrated  magazine  in  America  which  habitu- 
ally declines  to  conciliate  its  readers,  or  to  consider 


PREFACE 


II 


either  the  advertisers  or  the  subscription  lists  in  de- 
ciding what  art  and  what  writing  it  shall  publish. 
The  fact  that  nobody  is  trying  to  make  dividends 
out  of  The  Masses,  has  given  it  a  unique  character, 
has  given  it  the  freedom  for  a  perfectly  wilful  play 
of  the  creative  faculties,  such  as  would  inevitably 
produce  unique  works  of  art. 

Some  time  ago  the  New  York  papers  announced 
a  disagreement  among  the  editors  of  The  Masses, 
and  the  resignation  of  one  or  two  of  its  artists.  And 
they  were  happy  to  infer  from  this  that  the  basic 
principle  upon  which  the  magazine  was  conducted, 
had  proven  Utopian  and  unworkable.  As  disagree- 
ments and  resignations  frequently  occur  among  their 
own  editors,  whose  principle  is  the  very  workable 
one  of  publishing  for  profit,  the  inference  was  obvi- 
ously a  little  extreme.  But  it  seems  important  to 
state,  in  contradicting  them,  just  what  question  it 
was  upon  which  a  division  occurred  among  the  ed- 
itors of  The  Masses. 

Some  of  the  contributing  editors,  who  are  also 
the  owners  of  this  magazine,  desired  to  make  The 
Masses  free,  not  only  from  any  journalistic  influ- 
ence, but  also  from  the  influence  of  an  editorial  art. 
They  wished  to  conduct  their  magazine  somewhat  in 
the  manner  of  the  new  art  galleries,  in  which  each 


12 


PREFACE 


artist  is  given  an  opportunity,  subject  only  to  the 
tolerance  of  his  fellows,  to  exhibit  at  any  given  time 
anything  that  he  chooses.  That  is,  they  wished  to 
sacrifice  the  symmetry,  completeness,  order,  timeli- 
ness, unity  in  variety,  and  so  forth,  of  the  magazine 
as  a  whole,  to  the  ideal  of  unconditioned  individual 
expression. 

To  the  majority,  while  this  seemed  a  valuable 
thing  to  do,  it  did  not  seem  the  best  thing  to  do  with 
The  Masses.  They  desired  The  Masses  to  have 
form  and  policy,  and  they  decided  that  the  way  to 
make  such  a  magazine  free,  is  to  give  to  an  editor 
a  freedom  of  his  own  after  the  contributing  artists 
and  writers  have  produced  or  designated  in  general 
the  material  with  which  he  is  to  work.  It  was 
upon  this  question,  and  not  upon  the  deeper  prin- 
ciple of  freedom  from  journalistic  standards,  that 
the  division  occurred. 

For  my  part  I  am  still  in  the  mood  of  a  humble, 
although  in  this  matter  obstreperous,  pupil  to  the 
artists  who  have  made  pictures  for  The  Masses^  and 
it  is  with  profound  gratitude  for  my  education  that 
I  dedicate  this  little  book  to  them. 

Max  Eastman. 


NOTE 


These  four  essays  have  been  published  in  maga- 
zines: ''What  Is  the  Matter  with  Magazine  Art?' 
in  The  Masses,  ''Magazine  Writing"  in  Vanity 
Fair,  "Lazy  Verse"  in  The  New  Republic,  and 
"Why  English  Does  Not  Simplify  Her  Spelling"  in 
The  North  American  Review, 


13 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

Preface  7 

I    What  Is  the  Matter  with  Magazine 

Art?  21 

II    Magazine  Writing  65 

III  Lazy  Verse  8 'J 

IV  Why  English  Does  not  Simplify  Her 

Spelling  lOJ 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

The  Mask  of  the  Red  Death  Frontispiece 

PAGE 

The  Nice  Cool  Sewer               Arthur  Young  29 

A  Drawing                                Rembrandt  33 

A  Drawing                          Maurice  Becker  35 

Josie's  Eldest  Singing,  "None  so  Dauntless  and 

Free  on  Land  or  on  Sea"    Cornelia  Barns  37 

A  Cartoon                              Robert  Minor  43 

*'Gee,  Mag,  think  of  us  bein'  on  a  magazine 

cover  I"                             Stuart  Davis  47 

A  Portrait                             Pablo  Picas  so  55 

The  Oceanside  Hotel 

Reports  a  Cool  Summer     Maurice  Becker  59 

Washington  Square           Glenn  0.  Coleman  62 

The  Orango-Tango                     John  Sloan  71 

Chinese  Patrol  Reconnoitring  Honore  Daumier  77 


A  Drawing 
A  Melody 
A  Design 
A  Melody 
A  Husband 
A  Morning  Stroll 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

K,  R,  Chamberlain  83 
Arthur  B,  Davies  93 
Arthur  B.  Davies  99 
Arthur  B.  Davies  103 
George  Bellows  117 
H.  J.  Glintenkamp  129 


Philosopher  on  the  Rock 
The  Goose  Girl 


George  Bellows  135 
Jean  Frangois  Millet  141 


WHAT  IS  THE  MATTER  WITH 
MAGAZINE  ART? 


Journalism  Versus  Art 


WHAT  IS  THE  MATTER  WITH 
MAGAZINE  ART^ 

DRAWING  is  destined  to  a  high  place 
among  the  arts,  for  drawings,  like  music, 
can  be  adequately  reproduced  and  widely 
distributed.  And  while  this  has  appeared  a  detri- 
ment in  the  light  of  aristocratic  ideals,  in  the  light  of 
democracy  it  is  a  fine  virtue.  The  ideal  of  democ- 
racy has  indeed  given  to  many  artists  of  our  day  a 
new  interest  in  drawing.  Some  of  the  best  painters 
in  America  would  draw  for  the  popular  magazines, 
if  popular  magazine  editors  had  an  interest  in  true 
art. 

That  the  editors  have  not  an  interest  in  true  art  is 
due,  I  suppose,  not  to  any  natural  depravity  in  them, 

21 


22         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


but  to  their  struggle  for  existence  under  the  prevail- 
ing system  of  journalism.  And  the  system,  briefly, 
is  this: 

A  publication  is  a  piece  of  goods  manufactured 
and  sold  in  competition  with  others  for  the  benefit  of 
a  stock  company  that  owns  it.  The  stockholders  as 
a  group  are  interested  in  dividends.  They  hire  an 
editor  to  put  out  a  publication  that  will  sell,  and  they 
pay  him  according  to  his  success.  Editors,  like  hu- 
man beings,  are  prone  to  eat  food,  and  beget  fami- 
lies, which  is  to  say  that  their  tastes  and  ideas  are 
subject  to  an  economic  interpretation.  And  so  they 
seek  to  mix  into  their  publication  a  little  bit  of  ev- 
erything that  will  sell.  The  editorial  art  is  the  art 
of  ever  attracting  a  new  constituency  without  alien- 
ating the  old.  The  result,  an  insane  passion  for 
variety,  but  a  perfectly  automatic  toning  down  of 
every  variant  that  appears.  A  profitable  mediocrity 
— sometimes  called  a  "golden  mean" — is  the  edi- 
torial ideal. 

And  artists,  like  editors,  are  "economically  deter- 
mined."   They  learn  to  draw  pictures  that  will  sell, 


MAGAZINE  ART 


23 


pictures  that  will  attract  ever  new  constituents  with- 
out alienating  the  old.  Or  if  their  native  impulse 
to  be  an  individual,  an  object  of  hate  as  well  as  of 
love,  is  too  strong — then  they  do  not  draw  for  publi- 
cation at  all,  which  comes  to  the  same  thing  in  its 
effect  upon  magazine  art. 

This,  then,  is  the  diagnosis  of  published  art  in 
America.  It  is  business  art.  It  does  not  aim  to 
achieve  the  beautiful,  the  real,  the  ideal,  the  charac- 
teristic, the  perfect,  the  sublime,  the  ugly,  the  gro- 
tesque, the  harmonious,  the  symmetrical,  or  any 
other  of  those  ends  that  various  schools  of  art  and  art 
criticism  have  with  similar  merit  set  before  them.  It 
aims  to  achieve  profits  in  competition.  And  any  or 
all  of  those  genuinely  artistic  aims  are  subordinated 
to  that. 

At  this  point,  certain  persons  whom  I  should  wish 
to  have  disagree  with  me  throughout  life  and  liter- 
ature, will  chime  in  with,  "Yes,  you're  right.  The 
trouble  is  that  the  people  don't  want  true  art,  and 
the  magazines  have  to  give  the  people  what  they 
want." 


24         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

The  trouble  is  not  so  simple.  It  would  not  take 
"the  people"  long  to  discover  and  express  their  lik- 
ings for  true  art,  if  enough  true  art,  enough  kinds  of 
true  art,  were  offered  them.  Only  they  would  not 
all  discover  likings  for  the  same  kind.  And  that  is 
what  makes  competitive  business  so  incompatible 
with  the  artist's  ideal.  True  art  is  not  one  and  in- 
divisible, the  same  to-day,  yesterday,  and  forever. 
Indeed,  the  more  highly  evolved  a  group  of  art 
works  is,  the  more  do  individual  specimens  differ,  and 
the  more  certain  it  is  that  some  people  will  definitely 
dislike  some  specimens.  And  so  it  falls  out  that,  al- 
though plenty  of  people  would  like  true  art,  still  the 
effort  to  please  a  great  many  people  all  the  time  and 
never  to  displease  any,  results  in  a  drab  and  mediocre 
semblance  of  art. 

Might  we  not  almost  define  good  art — braving  the 
learned  dogmas  of  the  schools — as  art  which  gives  a 
high  degree  of  satisfaction  to  those  who  like  it? 
And  does  it  not  almost  follow  that  it  will  give  equal 
dissatisfaction  to  those  who  do  not  like  it?  But  the 
aim  of  a  money-making  magazine  is  to  give  neither 


MAGAZINE  ART  25 

intense  pleasures  nor  intense  displeasures  to  a  few, 
but  to  please  everybody  a  little  all  the  time — 
namely,  about  ten  or  fifteen  cents'  worth.  Then 
only  can  the  editors  feel  steadfast  and  sure  in  regard 
to  those  dividends. 

Let  us  consider  the  prevailing  features  of  maga- 
zine art  in  America,  and  judge  if  they  do  not  sus- 
tain this  diagnosis.  We  shall  find  that  they  each 
arise  out  of  the  desire  to  please  everybody  a  little 
and  displease  none. 

I 

Magazine  art  tends  to  be  photographic.  By  which 
I  mean  that  it  tries  to  reproduce  every  portion  of  a 
figure,  as  seen  from  a  certain  point,  with  mechanical 
preciseness — eliminating  all  those  lights  and  shad- 
ows, emergings  and  recedings,  suppressions  and  dis- 
tortions of  external  reality  which  the  individual  hu- 
man factor  puts  into  a  perception.  The  trained 
magazine  artist  has  carefully  destroyed  all  his  own 
warm  and  lovable  idiosyncrasies,  and  turned  himself 
into  a  reproducing  machine  which  can  "go  over"  a 


26        JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


canvas  from  top  to  bottom,  and  "put  in"  with  un- 
erring accuracy  everything  that  "ought  to"  be  there. 
He  is  a  highly  skilled  person.  He  knows  how  to 
draw  men,  horses,  buttons,  pants,  books,  hatracks, 
seltzer  bottles,  shoes,  shoestrings,  cats,  frowns, 
kisses,  hot-water  bottles,  anything  and  everything, 
scattered  or  combined;  but  how  to  draw  a 
single  human  perception  he  has  not  the  slightest 
idea. 

Nor  does  he  need  one,  for  his  accurate  reproduc- 
tions in  skillful  perspective  give  a  certain  rudimen- 
tary satisfaction  to  everybody — the  satisfaction  of 
saying,  "My,  ain't  that  a  good  likeness!" 

We  have  the  authority  of  Aristotle  that  this — "the 
pleasure  of  recognition" — is  most  fundamental  and 
universal  of  the  aesthetic  pleasures.  But  we  do 
not  need  any  authority,  for  every  honest  person — 
even  the  pastmaster  of  futurism — will  have  to  con- 
fess that  still  the  child  in  him  takes  a  rudimentary 
satisfaction  in  this  feat  when  it  is  well  done. 

At  the  time  when  I  grew  beyond  a  purely  childish 
interest  in  pictures,  I  formed  the  habit  of  looking 


MAGAZINE  ART 


27 


through  the  comic  weeklies  for  drawings  by  Art 
Young.  If  any  one  then  had  asked  me  why  I  liked 
these  drawings  better  than  others,  I  should  have  said : 
"I  don't  know — they're  so  funny  looking."  But  I 
could  say  more  than  that  now.  I  could  say  that 
Art  Young  was  almost  the  first  popular  draughts- 
man in  America  to  quit  drawing  standard  types, 
pictures  of  pictures  of  pictures  of  people,  and  be- 
gin drawing  people — the  people  around  him  the  way 
they  look  through  his  eyes.  And  that  they  look 
"funny,"  and  look  as  they  never  looked  before  and 
never  will  again,  was  not  a  discovery  peculiar  to 
me. 

Consider  his  "Nice  Cool  Sewer"  picture  from  The 
Masses  for  May,  1913.  A  critic  on  the  Evening 
Mail  declares  that  this  drawing  is  "already  a  classic" 
— but  I  find  people  who  do  not  like  it.  They  think 
it  is  not  "done."  "Why,  his  hands  look  like  mit- 
tens I"  they  say.    "They're  not  hands !" 

No — they  are  not  hands,  not  objective  hands, 
hands  in  the  abstract,  hands  from  a  hand  factory. 
They  are  a  certain  peculiar  individual's  perception  of 


28         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


the  hands  of  a  certain  peculiar  man,  a  tired  man,  a 
man  sunk  onto  a  chair  at  the  end  of  a  dirty  day's 
work,  a  man  who  feels  bad  and  smells  bad  to  him- 
self, and  wishes  he  were  abed. 

However,  there  is  no  entering  a  brief  for  the  pic- 
ture, no  judging  its  artistic  merit.  The  final  truth 
about  its  merit  is  that  some  people  will  see  the  pic- 
ture, and  some  will  not,  but  those  who  see  it  will 
see  it  with  great  joy,  for  it  is  not  a  picture  of  a  pic- 
ture, nor  yet  even  a  picture  of  a  man,  but  a  picture 
of  a  perception  of  a  man. 

The  difference  between  drawing  a  man  and  draw- 
ing a  perception  of  a  man,  is  akin  to  the  difference 
between  knowledge  and  experience.  The  thing  an 
artist  has  to  do  is  to  transcend  his  knowledge  and 
win  his  way  back  to  experience.  Take  a 
crude  illustration.  If  you,  being  as  stupid 
about  these  things  as  I  am,  set  out  to  draw 
a  man  going  east,  you  would  do  it  the  first 
time  in  this  fashion: 

That  would  be  a  poor  picture  of  a  man  going  east, 
and  you  would  decide  that  you  know  very  little  about 


MAGAZINE  ART 


31 


physiognomy.  On  the  contrary,  however,  you  know 
too  much.  Your  knowledge  is  what  got  in  your  way. 
You  know,  for  instance,  what  is  the  shape  of  a  man's 
eye,  and  you  drew  a  picture  of  your  knowledge  in- 
stead of  drawing  the  looks  of  an  eye. 
Empty  yourself  of  that  knowledge,  and 
you  will  draw  it  this  way:  Somewhat 
the  way  it  looks. 

I  here  reach  the  limit  of  my  artist- 
training,  but  no  more  is  needed  to  show  the  usual 
progress  toward  real  drawing.  It  is  a  progress  away 
from  knowledge  about  things  toward  experience  of 
things,  away  from  abstraction  toward  concrete  per- 
ception. 

And  when  we  pass  beyond  the  photographic,  or 
kodak,  style  of  art,  we  are  only  taking  further  steps 
in  the  same  direction.  For,  strangely  enough,  a  pho- 
tograph is  a  good  deal  more  like  knowledge  than  it  is 
like  perception.  It  has  perspective,  to  be  sure,  but 
that  is  all  it  has  that  resembles  visual  experience. 
When  we  look  at  an  object  we  allow  our  own  charac- 
ter, our  memories,  predilections,  interests,  emotions. 


32         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

ideas,  to  determine  what  we  shall  see  and  how  we 
shall  see  it.  We  do  something.  We  go  out  and 
seize  the  salient  details  of  the  object,  and  we  over- 
emphasize, and  perfect,  and  condense,  and  alter,  and 
mutilate,  and  idealize — in  short,  we  perform  the  cre- 
ative act  of  perception.  And  when  artists  draw  cre- 
atively, when  they  draw  with  individuality,  as  we 
say,  and  with  freedom,  they  are  simply  coming  nearer 
to  that  natural  act  of  ours.  They  are  coming  nearer 
to  real  experience. 

Great  artists  have  always  drawn  in  this  way. 
There  is  nothing  modern  that  departs  more  boldly 
from  what  we  know  the  human  proportions  to  be, 
than  the  drawings  of  Michael  Angelo.  There  is 
nothing  less  like  a  photograph  than  the  sketches  of 
Leonardo. 

But  most  magazine  illustrators  have  never  caught 
the  fever  of  individual  being.  They  have  never  de- 
clared themselves  free  and  independent  of  custom- 
ary knowledge;  they  have  never  gone  beyond  cater- 
ing to  the  rudimentary  pleasure  of  recognition.  And 
in  a  commercial  way  it  is  well  for  them,  because  if 


MAGAZINE  ART  33 

they  should  put  their  own  individual  vision  strongly 
into  a  picture,  a  great  many  people  to  whom  their 


A  DRAWING  BY  REMBRANDT 


individuality  is  uncongenial,  would  dislike  the  pic- 
ture, whereas  the  mere  act  of  easy  recognition  pleases 
everybody  a  little. 


34        JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


II 

When  magazine  art  is  not  photographic,  it  makes 
up  for  that  by  being  neat  and  "slick."  Perhaps 
chique  is  the  technical  word.  I  mean  that  if  there  is 
anything  omitted  or  varied  by  the  individual  mind  of 
the  artist,  the  variation  is  so  definite,  arbitrary,  and 
regular,  as  to  carry  us  still  farther  away  from  a  real 
perception  instead  of  nearer  to  it.  No  one  could 
accuse  the  usual  magazine  poster  prodigy  of  being 
photographic.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  nothing  but  a 
pattern,  a  conventionalized  symbol,  a  deft  mechan- 
ically cut  and  trimmed  diagram  remotely  suggest- 
ing a  young  lady  in  the  agonies  of  fashionable  at- 
tire. 

Let  us  compare  with  it  a  drawing  which  is  still 
less  photographic.  I  choose  one  that  was  exhibited 
at  the  McDowell  Society  in  New  York  a  while  ago. 
One  of  the  chief  virtues  of  this  drawing,  in  compari- 
son with  the  usual  poster  is  that  it  is  not  a  drawing 
of  a  girl.  But  that  is  not  the  virtue  I  mean  to  point 
out.    I  mean  to  point  out  that  here  is  a  drawing 


MAGAZINE  ART 


35 


even  more  abbreviated,  more  incomplete,  less  filled 
up  with  meat,  but  which  comes  right  back  to  reality, 
instead  of  going  farther  away  from  it.    For  those 


2  S 
•a 


i 


I :  ^  ~  ?  ^ 


'KIP 


iil  i  2  s  ^ 


A  DRAWING  BY  MAURICE  BECKER 


who  can  see  it,  this  is  a  most  true,  intimate,  and  final 
picture  of  a  certain  dog — sketched  with  unerring 
loyalty  to  the  eye,  and  sketched,  moreover,  with  liv- 


36         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


ing  sympathy  and  emotion.  For  those  who  see  it,  it 
is  exquisite,  but  for  those  who  do  not,  it  is  only  a 
piece  of  old  newspaper — the  last  thing  in  the  world 
to  pay  money  for.  And  so  it  is  not  a  magazine  draw- 
ing, while  the  chique  young  lady  of  the  poster  decid- 
edly is.  For  neatness  of  execution — no  matter  how 
inhuman  and  foolish  the  subject  matter — pleases 
everybody  a  little.  Sometimes  we  call  it  "decora- 
tive"— and  sometimes  it  is ! 

Ill 

When  magazine  drawings  express  feeling,  the  feel- 
ings they  express  are  only  the  obvious  and  conven- 
tional ones  of  average  people  with  coins  in  their 
pockets. 

Wistfidness  in  a  pretty  girl — indicated  by  arching 
her  eyebrows  clear  up  into  her  hair. 

Adventurous  although  stylish  athleticism  in  a 
young  man — indicated  in  the  jaw  and  pants. 

Romance  in  the  meeting  of  the  two — indicated  by 
his  gazing  upon  the  earth,  she  upon  infinity. 


MAGAZINE  ART 


39 


Pathos  of  old  age — indicated  with  bending  knees 
or  a  market  basket. 

Sweet  and  divine  innocence  of  children — usually 
indicated  in  the  stockings. 

These  are  the  principal  sentiments  appealed  to. 
And  I  would  not  suggest  that  these  sentiments  are  of 
any  less  intrinsic  worth  than  others,  only  why  ding 
dong  upon  them  perpetually,  page  after  page,  and 
month  after  month — except  because  they  are  the  ob- 
vious and  rudimentary  sentiments  which  everybody 
feels,  and  all  feel  in  substantially  the  same  way,  and 
all  like  to  see  expressed^  Whereas,  if  you  delve 
down  into  those  passions  which  are  deep  and  elemen- 
tal, you  find  thousands  who  will  resent  your  manner 
of  expressing  them;  and  if  you  drift  out  into  those 
veins  of  feeling  which  are  high-wrought,  and  subtle, 
and  not  to  be  named  with  names,  you  will  find  that 
people  differ  so  much  in  these  feelings  that  one  will 
be  attuned  to  one  picture  and  another  to  another,  and 
there  is  danger  of  losing  the  old  constituency  while 
you  are  attracting  the  new.  And  thus  it  is  more 
profitable  to  hammer  away  upon  the  tonic  chord  of 


40        JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


ordinary  humane  feeling,  where  we  are  all  alike,  and 
will  go  patiently  out  and  pay  down  our  fifteen  cents 
for  the  same  old  song. 

IV 

When  magazine  art  expresses  ideas,  these  are 
the  ideas  most  obvious  and  most  current  among  those 
who  can  afford  to  buy. 

Many  years  back,  for  example,  Life  has  been 
profiting  upon  pictures  in  ridicule  of  the  idea  of 
woman  suffrage,  and  the  feminist  movement  in  gen- 
eral. But  after  Mrs.  Pankhurst  woke  up  the  press, 
and  through  that  the  world,  to  the  biological  signifi- 
cance and  power  of  the  change  in  women,  the  profit 
upon  female  ridicule  dwindled.  The  idea  of  the 
Eternal  Feminine  as  a  Perfect  Lady  grew  a  little 
less  obvious  than  it  used  to  be.  And  so  Life  one  day 
graciously  persuaded  itself  to  bring  out  a  "Pro-Suf- 
frage Number,"  advertising  among  its  artists  for  pic- 
tures expressing  the  values  of  a  real  woman.  Now 
this  little  gamble  on  opinions  is  only  a  kind  of  frivol- 
ous example  of  the  general  art  policy  I  have  outlined 


MAGAZINE  ART 


41 


— to  attract  ever  a  new  constituency  and  yet  not  al- 
ienate the  old.  I  believe  that  Life  could  profit  now — 
just  because  people  are  beginning  to  acquire  a  degree 
of  mercy  toward  men  almost  equal  to  that  they  feel 
toward  animals — by  dropping  anti-vivisection  and 
bringing  out  a  Pro-Jewish  number.  And  doubtless  the 
artists  would  excel,  as  they  did  in  the  Pro-Suffrage 
number.  For  obviously  no  true  works  of  expressive  art 
can  be  created  when  the  thing  to  be  expressed  is  deter- 
mined, not  by  the  naturally  unconventional  prompt- 
ings of  native  inspiration,  but  by  an  editor  scared  into 
a  mania  for  the  obvious.  However,  the  very  trick  of 
cartoon  expression,  the  graphic  representation  of  an 
idea — any  idea  that  is  not  radically  displeasing  in 
itself — gives  a  slight  pleasure  to  almost  anybody. 

V 

Magazine  art  is  monotonous.  Well,  everything 
there  is  much  of  is  monotonous.  But  magazine  art 
makes  an  ideal  of  monotony.  "The  Gibson  Girl," 
'The  Christy  Girl,"  "The  Stanlaws  Girl,"  "The 
Harrison  Fisher  Girl" — these  are  features  to  be  ad- 


42         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

vertised  on  the  front  cover.  And  yet  what  is  the 
advertisement,  but  an  obituary  notice  of  these  men 
as  artists?  It  certifies  that  they  have  given  up  their 
profession  of  realizing  in  line  the  varieties  of  life's 
experience,  and  gone  into  the  manufacturing  busi- 
ness. They  are  now  turning  out  an  article  that 
will  sell  widely  in  competition,  because  it  is  modelled 
strictly  on  the  lines  here  indicated;  and  while  they 
may  find  it  profitable  to  vary  the  model  a  little  from 
year  to  year,  as  progressive  manufacturers  do,  the 
main  lines  were  laid  down  in  the  first  big  sale,  and 
no  risks  will  be  taken. 

I  do  not  want  to  lessen  the  glory  that  naturally 
adheres  to  these  men  for  having  created  these  types. 
Charles  Dana  Gibson  is  the  original  discoverer  of 
the  psycho-physical  law  that  an  anatomically  impos- 
sible amount  of  space  between  the  eye  and  the  eye- 
brow of  the  female  produces  a  romantic  reaction  in 
the  male.  This  was  a  big  discovery  in  every  way. 
It  was  long  known  that  certain  slight  physical  ab- 
normalities are  a  sex  stimulus.  We  found  that  out 
almost  as  soon  as  we  came  down  from  the  trees,  and 


"your  honor,  this  woman  gave  birth  to  a  naked  child! 

robert  minor 


MAGAZINE  ART 


45 


we  used  to  get  the  girls  to  alter  themselves  a  little 
instead  of  just  altering  their  pictures.  At  least  so 
the  anthropologists  tell  us.  But,  at  any  rate,  the  art 
was  forgotten,  and  the  rediscovery  of  its  charm  was 
altogether  a  new  thing  and  a  big  thing. 

So  big,  in  fact,  that  it  seemed  to  overwhelm  the 
artist,  and  he  stopped  there,  and  went  into  the  busi- 
ness of  manufacturing  paper  ladies — a  business 
which  quite  wrecked  his  art,  so  far  at  least  as  the 
youthful  female  is  concerned.  In  the  characterizing 
of  the  male  and  the  elderly  female,  Gibson  has  al- 
ways been  an  artist,  has  always  enjoyed  within  nat- 
ural limitations  of  feeling,  the  varieties  of  life. 
He  is  the  best  magazine  artist  who  ever  learned  the 
trick  of  pleasing  everybody  a  little.  Perhaps,  how- 
ever, his  naturally  not  very  wide  range  of  feeling — 
never  transcending  a  genial  and  humane  interest — 
has  made  this  possible.  So  that  even  in  these  re- 
spects in  which  he  is  a  true  artist,  Gibson  is  still  an 
example  of  the  monotony  that  is  inevitable  in  pleas- 
ing everybody  a  little.  Descend  to  the  imitators — 
the  millions  of  manufacturers  of  the  girl  of  the  far- 


46         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

away-look — and  we  find  monotony  so  idealized,  en- 
trenched, and  confirmed  by  commercial  success,  that 
we  cannot  characterize  their  separate  styles  at  all. 
We  can  only  say  that  the  thought  of  a  magazine 
cover  makes  us  tired. 

VI 

One  kind  of  variety,  indeed,  has  been  found  profit- 
able by  all  editors — and  that  is  variety  in  the  shape 
of  pictures  and  their  disposition  upon  the  page. 
And  this  variety  has  been  cultivated  as  carefully  as 
monotony  in  the  pictures  themselves.  The  principal 
function  of  the  art-editor  is  to  fix  a  magazine  so  that 
when  it  is  held  loosely  in  the  left  hand,  and  the  pages 
run  off  rapidly  by  the  right  thumb,  a  sort  of  kaleido- 
scopic motion-picture  results.  Black  spots  and  queer 
blotches  are  seen  dashing  from  one  part  of  the  page 
to  another,  and  the,^ effect  is  quite  stimulating  to  the 
curiosity.  This  is  no  proof  that  after  the  purchase 
is  made,  any  one  enjoys  reading  type  which  jumps 
across,  over,  under  and  around  the  misshapen  angles 
of  an  extraneous  insert.    It  is  no  proof  that  any  one 


MAGAZINE  ART 


49 


enjoys  looking  at  pictures  which  are  jumped  across, 
and  poked  into,  by  fragments  of  irrelevant  letter- 
press. No — ^merely  that  this  "variety  of  make-up" 
has  the  look  of  a  circus  as  you  pass  by.  And  you 
never  remember  how  you  are  fooled.  You  bite  again 
at  the  next  flutter. 

This  may  be  an  extreme  statement,  but  I  doubt  if 
anybody  really  likes  a  picture  of  a  horse-race  with 
the  rear-end  of  a  horse  racing  off  one  page,  and  the 
forward  quarters  racing  onto  the  other,  and  a  half- 
inch  white  margin  intervening.  It  is  impossible  to 
put  much  speed  into  such  a  picture.  It  is  impos- 
sible to  put  much  heart  into  the  creation  of  a  picture 
that  is  to  be  so  treated. 

VII 

Besides  being  mutilated  and  vivisected,  magazine 
drawings  are  belittled.  And  this  is  one  thing  that 
cannot  happen  to  a  story.  A  story  may  be  lost  in 
the  scramble  for  advertising.  It  may  be  given  a 
fairly  formidable  appearance  at  the  front  of  the 
magazine,  and  then  peter  out  into  a  long,  dreary  little 


50         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

tail  coiling  its  way  among  tomato  cans,  and  tobacco, 
and  beer,  at  the  back.  But  the  story  must  needs  be 
legible,  if  it  is  worth  printing  at  all.  And  if  it  is 
legible,  then  it  exists  as  a  work  of  art.  But  not  so 
the  pictures.  A  picture  may  exist  at  eight-by-twelve 
inches,  and  be  absolutely  annihilated  in  the  reduction 
to  one-and-a-half-by-two.  We  might  say  that  the 
average  picture  in  our  popular  magazine  is  about 
half  alive.  The  vigor  is  squeezed  out  of  it  by  the 
engraver;  and  even  then  it  is  given  no  margin,  no 
space  in  which  to  breathe. 

All  of  which  is  but  a  further  evidence  of  the  com- 
mercial idealism  that  determines  and  controls  this 
art.  A  magazine  which  is  "chuck  full  of  pictures 
and  stuff"  seems  to  be  a  fat  bargain.  No  matter 
whether  the  pictures  really  exist  or  not — they  look 
as  though  they  did,  and  the  number  is  large,  and  it 
takes  a  long  time  to  crowd  one's  way  through  the 
magazine,  and  one  feels  as  though  he  were  getting  his 
money's  worth.  And  while  this  may  be  a  small  satis- 
faction for  so  much  trouble,  it  is  a  satisfaction  that 
everybody  enjoys  a  little. 


MAGAZINE  ART 


51 


VIII 

Magazine  drawings  are  mainly  "illustrative." 
Their  creation  is  usually  initiated  and  accomplished 
somewhat  in  the  following  manner : 

The  editor  hands  a  manuscript  to  a  poor  man  who 
is — metaphorically  at  least — hungry.  "We  want 
two  illustrations  for  this,"  he  says,  "and  we  must 
have  them  by  the  fourteenth — play  up  the  woman." 

The  artist  goes  home  and  reads  the  story.  He 
does  not  enjoy  it,  and  he  has  no  desire  to  illustrate 
it.  He  probably  never  had  a  desire  to  illustrate  any 
story.  Neither  did  the  author  have  a  desire  to  have 
anybody  illustrate  his  story.  Neither  does  the  ed- 
itor have  any  desire  to  see  an  illustration  of  the  story. 
Neither  does  the  reader  consider  the  illustration  an 
addition  to  the  story. 

All  the  reader  cares  about  is  that  the  magazine 
should  not  look  dull  when  he  approaches  it;  all  the 
editor  cares  about  is  that  the  reader  should  be  led 
to  approach  it;  all  the  author  cares  about  is  that 
he  should  have  a  popular  artist's  name  attached  to  his 


S2        JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

story;  and  all  the  artist  cares  about  is  that  he  should 
sufficiently  conform  to  the  business  standard  of  art 
so  that  the  editor  will  give  him  a  full,  or  at  least 
a  half-page,  and  pay  him  a  full  or  at  least  a  half- 
price. 

Of  course,  these  statements  are  sweeping  and  not 
strictly  true.  But  they  are  more  true  than  any  other 
sweeping  statements  you  could  make  about  the  popu- 
lar art  of  illustrating  stories.  Except  at  those  times 
when  an  artist  and  an  author  spontaneously  discover 
in  themselves  a  real  harmony  of  inspiration — and 
those  times  are  rare — we  may  say  that  the  illus- 
trator's business  is  but  an  adventitious  appendage  to 
a  real  art.  But  it  is  an  easy  way  to  promote  that 
variety  of  physical  make-up  which  furnishes  a  slight 
pleasure  to  everybody  and  no  great  displeasure  to 
any. 

It  would  be  agreeable  to  dwell  in  anticipation  upon 
the  nature  of  magazine  art  in  the  distant  future, 
when  the  ideals  of  the  business  office  have  ceased  to 
reign  supreme ;  but  it  would  be  impossible.    For  one 


MAGAZINE  ART 


53 


cannot  describe  a  thing  whose  very  excellence  shall 
consist  in  continual  and  surprising  variation. 
Magazine  art  will  be  true  art,  and  every  work  of 
true  art  is  unique.  The  only  way,  therefore,  in 
which  it  can  be  described  in  general  is  to  say  that  it 
will  be  free  from  the  tyranny  of  this  demand  that 
everybody  be  pleased  with  it — free  to  make  enemies 
as  well  as  friends. 

Such  art  can  never  flourish  under  the  commercial 
editor.  To  say  nothing  of  the  strain  put  upon  his 
business  by  publishing  something  shockingly  but 
surely  great,  he  must  also  be  ready  to  take  chances 
upon  that  which  is  shocking  but  not  surely  great. 
Like  the  artist  himself,  or  the  poet,  he  must  live  the 
experimental  life.  Fear  and  a  failure  of  the  spirit 
of  adventure  are  the  death  of  art.  Recklessness  is  its 
life.  And  if  ever  there  appears  on  this  earth  such 
a  thing  as  an  editorial  art,  it  will  be  when  commer- 
cial timidity  is  removed  from  the  inner  office  and  a 
spirit  of  free  and  genuine  sport  is  enshrined  there. 

We  can  perhaps  point  out,  in  conclusion,  one  or 
two  little  things  that  the  true  magazine  art  of  the 


54         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

future  will  not  be,  and  this  will  help  people  to  recog- 
nize it  when  it  begins  to  appear. 

It  will  not  be  carelessness  of  technique  taking  the 
place  of  carefulness.  No  artist  is  free  whose  hand 
is  not  wholly  under  the  dominion  of  his  feeling  or 
his  idea. 

It  will  not  be  an  imitation  of  foreign  monstrosi- 
ties supplanting  the  native  monstrosities  of  America. 
Art  need  have  no  national  boundaries,  but  this  does 
not  mean  that  the  imitation  of  Germans  or  French- 
men is  any  more  inspiring  than  the  imitation  of  the 
folks  at  home. 

It  will  not  be  realism  supplanting  idealism.  It 
will  not  be  love  of  the  poignant  supplanting  love  of 
the  perfect,  nor  any  one  artistic  ideal  supplanting 
any  other.  They  are  all  human  and  they  are  all 
divine,  those  ideals  of  art.  And  the  important  thing 
is  that  the  appreciator — and  here  again,  the  editor — 
shall  know  how  to  judge  each  work  by  its  own 
standard,  and  not  by  the  standard  of  something  else. 
The  function  of  the  critic — if  he  has  any — is  to  en- 
courage every  creator  to  be  himself  at  his  best. 


A  PORTRAIT.   PABLO  PICASSO 


MAGAZINE  ART 


57 


It  will  not  be  drawings  of  the  ugly  and  disgust- 
ing, the  slops  and  drippings  of  a  miserable  civiliza- 
tion, supplanting  the  drawings  of  the  festive  and 
beautiful.  A  little  while  ago,  a  paragraph  in  Col- 
lier's Magazine  presumed  to  denounce  from  the 
standpoint  of  morality  some  of  the  young  artists 
of  our  times,  and  I  quote  it : 

Many  of  the  stern  young  moralists  who  are  winning 
fame  by  their  pictures  In  our  magazines  seem  (to  paraphrase 
a  homely  proverb)  to  have  the  same  bad  smell  up  their  nos- 
trils. Their  people  are  gawky,  greasy,  febrile,  and  mean; 
they  are  doing  contemptible  things  in  a  graceless,  animal 
sort  of  fashion;  their  backgrounds  are  dingy,  tawdry,  and 
slovenly  or  unsanitary.  Life  Is  shown  In  the  guise  of  the 
thriftless  seeker  after  low  pleasures.  And  yet  these  artists 
are  Intelligent,  educated,  alive,  with  the  artists'  deft  hand 
and  trained  eye.  They  prove  it  by  drawing  a  revolting 
bunch  of  cats  and  dogs  prowling  about  some  overturned 
garbage  cans ! 

The  life  of  a  great  and  eager  city  is  all  about  them 
— you  can  see  courtesy  in  the  subway  and  devotion  to  duty 
in  many  a  dingy  shop,  but  they  prefer  the  manners 
and  labors  of  the  roof  garden.  One  may  see  men  stopping 
in  the  street  to  stare  up  at  the  amazing  beauty  of  our 
tall  buildings  against  the  misty  blue  of  the  September 


58         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

sky,  but  these  are  not  artists,  only  low  fellows  whose  im- 
migration hither  should  have  been  prevented  by  law! 

If  this  paragraph  had  been  written  from  the  stand- 
point of  art,  it  would  be  but  another  proof  of  the 
fact  that  anything  strong  makes  enemies  as  well  as 
friends.  But  the  paragraph  was  written  from  the 
standpoint  of  morality.  And  I  have  to  say  that  it  is 
a  queer  morality  which  can  escape  the  grip  of  the 
tragic  problems  of  our  time  by  turning  the  eyes  in 
another  direction.  If  there  is  a  tendency  among 
free  and  democratic  artists  to  linger  among  destitutes 
and  prostitutes  and  those  whom  exploitation  has 
driven  to  vagrancy  and  crime,  this  is  not  because 
these  seem  truer  subjects  of  art,  but  because  they  are 
subjects  of  art  which  have  so  long  been  unrecognized. 
They  are  problems  of  moral  reflection,  moreover, 
which  have  too  long  been  unstudied.  It  may,  in- 
deed, be  true  that  freedom  to  see  and  sing  these  reali- 
ties has  turned  the  heads — or  the  hearts — of  some 
poets  and  artists.  They  may  have  fallen  a  little  in 
love  with  the  sordid  for  its  own  sake,  but  certainly 


THE  OCEANSIDE  HOTEL  REPORTS  A  COOL  SUMMER. 


MAURICE  BECKER 


MAGAZINE  ART 


61 


they  are  upon  the  heights  both  of  health  and  virtue, 
when  they  are  compared  with  those  moralists  who 
solve  the  profoundest  questions  of  our  civilization 
by  the  simple  device  of  looking  up  into  the  sky  where 
the  clouds  are  floating  so  sweetly  over  the  tall  build- 
ings. They  may  be  "stern" — these  young  artists — 
but  if  the  world,  like  the  writer  of  that  paragraph, 
proves  too  frivolous  to  face  them,  then  it  will  be  so 
much  the  worse  for  the  world. 

It  is  my  part,  however,  to  point  out  that  not  the 
painting  of  any  particular  truths  will  distinguish  the 
art  of  the  future,  but  the  freedom  to  paint  them  all — 
a  freedom  which  carries  untold  possibilities  and  un- 
told dangers.  If  the  new  love  of  this  freedom  has 
arisen  in  artists  who  are  big  enough  to  stand  it,  then 
we  are  on  the  verge  of  a  great  era  in  popular  art. 
But  if  these  artists  prove  only  little  bantams,  who 
have  their  heads  turned  the  first  time  they  find  out 
they  can  crow — it  is  vain  to  hope  for  anything  but  a 
new  series  of  monomanias.  The  fetters  are  removed 
— the  wings  are  free — there  is  room  for  untram- 
melled and  universal  genius.    But  self-infatuation. 


62         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

attitudinizing,  artificiality  of  technique,  erotic  at- 
tachment to  a  queer  subject  matter,  these  internal 


WASHINGTON  SQUARE.    GLENN  O.  COLEMAN 

fetters  are  as  quick  and  sure  death  to  liberty 
academic  custom  or  ancestor  worship. 


MAGAZINE  ART 


63 


If  intelligence  is  given  its  sovereignty,  and  if  men 
of  universality  arise,  the  twentieth  century  will  see 
an  age  of  art  and  poetry  surpassing  that  of  Elizabeth, 
because  to  the  splendid  paganism  and  great  gusto  of 
the  free  in  those  days  will  be  added  the  ideals  and 
the  achievements  of  science  and  democracy.  But  if 
intelligence  is  renounced  for  temperament,  if  Art  and 
not  Life  becomes  the  center  of  interest,  if  men  prove 
too  little  for  the  adventure — then  debauchment  and 
dementia  prsecox  are  the  harvest,  and  the  hope  is 
postponed. 


MAGAZINE  WRITING 


MAGAZINE  WRITING 


HAT  is  the  matter  with  magazine 
writing^"  said  the  editor:  "We 
want  two  thousand  words." 


"What  will  you  pay  me  per  word*?"  said  I.  And 
in  that  question  I  stated,  better  than  two  thousand 
words  can  tell,  what  is  the  matter  with  magazine 
writing. 

Magazine  writing  is  professional.  It  is  work  and 
not  play.  And  for  that  reason  it  is  never  pro- 
foundly serious  or  intensely  frivolous  enough  to  cap- 
tivate the  spirit.  It  lacks  abandon.  It  is  simply 
well  done. 

To  me,  I  confess,  it  is  amazingly  well  done.  The 
quantity  and  fluency  and  consummate  skill  of  these 
multiplying  pages  is  one  of  the  wonders  of  our  age. 
I  find  myself  dreading  lest  the  mere  number  of 
things  and  combinations  of  things  that  can  be,  or 

67 


68         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


happen,  or  be  imagined  on  the  surface  of  a  small 
planet  will  give  out,  and  the  magazines  have  to  quit 
because  it  is  all  done.  But  they  come  right  along, 
crowded  with  clever  and  lucid  and  entertaining  and 
perfectly  satisfactory  sentences  and  paragraphs. 
They  have  the  trade  of  literature  polished  and  refined 
to  the  last  item. 

But  it  does  not  captivate  us.  Professional  excel- 
lence never  does. 

The  desire  to  support  oneself,  and  if  possible  one's 
family,  is  a  civilized  expression  of  that  instinct  of 
self-preservation  which  lies  at  the  heart  of  all  ani- 
mal and  vegetable  life.  And  this  desire  is  so  funda- 
mental, so  strong,  and  so  accustomed  to  bend  all 
other  passions,  whims,  caprices,  energies  and  ideas, 
to  its  service,  that  when  it  is  once  aroused  and  func- 
tioning, nothing  else  in  us  can  withstand  it.  A  man 
is  either  living,  or  earning  his  living.  He  is  never 
doing  these  two  things,  purely,  at  once. 

And  the  literature  we  love  is  the  literature  whose 
motive  is  pure  living.  It  is  the  utter  and  extreme 
play  of  the  central  nervous  system  in  an  organism 


MAGAZINE  WRITING  69 

tragically  committed  by  its  heredity  to  the  continual 
performance  of  work.  In  that  play  alone  are  the 
serious  things  born — the  things  of  impersonal  and 
universal  import.  In  that  play  alone  is  the  heart 
altogether  gay  and  inconsiderate. 

Perhaps  you  will  think  that  if  gayety  and  serious 
passion  are  really  captivating,  they  ought  to  sell  at 
a  high  price,  and  therefore  the  commercial  motive 
ought  to  reinforce  instead  of  damping  them.  But 
for  a  peculiar  reason  you  are  wrong.  The  business 
motive  is  to  please  as  many  readers  as  possible^  and 
to  of  end  none.  That  is  what  the  editor  is  hired  by 
the  stockholders  to  do,  and  that  is  what  the  editor 
hires  the  writer  to  do.  And  the  writer  cannot  do 
that  by  allowing  himself  to  flow  into  his  pen,  for 
then,  though  he  will  captivate  those  who  like  that 
kind  of  a  self,  he  will  offend  those  who  do  not.  In 
order  to  please  everybody  and  offend  none,  he  must 
eliminate  all  these  warm  and  spontaneous  impulses 
that  are  his  very  own,  whatever  they  be,  and  con- 
fine his  efforts  to  the  creation  of  superficially  and 
obviously  "pleasant"  qualities,  like  fluency,  and  wit. 


70         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

and  the  glamor  of  sexuality  and  money,  and  a  few 
touches  of  pathos  and  purity,  and  no  difficulties  for 
the  understanding.  Everybody  likes  this  a  little, 
and  nobody  dislikes  it  much.  Therefore  it  sells  as 
widely  as  it  is  advertised.  But  as  soon  as  anyone 
cuts  loose,  and  lets  riot  his  own  unique  forms  of 
recklessness  or  religion,  his  writing  gets  a  strong  raw 
flavor  that  those  who  like  it  may  like  very  much,  but 
those  who  hate  it  will  abhor.  It  might  sell,  but  that 
would  be  an  accident,  and  one  can  not  support  a 
family  on  accidents. 

The  manner  in  which  this  commercial  preoccupa- 
tion passes  along  the  editor's  nerves  and  outward  to 
the  brains  of  his  contributors  is  sometimes  very 
subtle.  Young  writers  are  told  they  must  "come  to 
New  York  and  get  the  hang"  of  the  profession.  At 
other  times,  however,  it  is  not  subtle  at  all.  One 
of  our  esteemed  illustrators  in  a  moment  of  abandon 
painted  a  girl  with  a  puppy  in  her  arms  for  a  maga- 
zine cover.  The  editor  sent  it  back  and  asked  him 
to  change  the  puppy,  because  they  had  tried  a  puppy 
before,  and  found  that  their  readers  "didn't  like  to 


THE  ORANGO-TANGO.      JOHN  SLOAN 


MAGAZINE  WRITING  73 


see  a  girl's  affections  wasted  on  an  animal."  This 
courteous  consideration  of  editors  for  their  readers' 
feelings  comes  nearer  to  Christian  charity  than  any- 
thing else  we  have. 

Another  audacious  person  wrote  a  story  for  the 
Atlantic  Monthly  with  an  uproarious  boarding- 
house  celebration  in  it.  Somebody  yelled  "Who 
swiped  my  beer?"  which,  being  passed  through  the 
editor's  commercial  refining-mill,  came  out  in  the 
magazine,  "Please  pass  the  fudge!" 

You  will  believe  these  stories  if  you  are  a  maga- 
zine writer.  And  you  will  believe  them  if  you  are 
a  magazine  editor,  and  know  what  it  is  to  see  sitting 
like  a  barometer  of  calamity  over  your  desk,  super- 
vising every  stroke  of  the  blue  pencil,  that  fluctuat- 
ing subscription  list. 

Sometimes  it  is  subtle,  and  sometimes  it  is  obvi- 
ous, but  always  it  is  true,  that  magazine  literature 
is  presided  over  by  the  monotonous  desire  to  do  busi- 
ness. Magazine  literature  contains  no  accidents. 
It  takes  no  chances.  It  is  never  cracked  up  the 
middle.    It  is  never  fragmentary.    It  is  never 


74         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

mussy  with  the  individual  finger-prints  of  him  who 
loved  it  too  hard.  It  is  never  queer;  it  is  never 
grotesque;  never  alien,  or  exaggerated,  or  sublime. 
It  has  always  the  professional  finish,  the  smooth 
round  regular  decorated  mechanical  perfection 
characteristic  of  all  goods  that  are  turned  out  in 
large  quantities  to  sell. 

The  reason  I  understand  this  thing  so  well  is  that 
in  a  small  way  I  have  been  through  it.  It  has  been 
the  inflexible  rule  of  my  life  never  to  try  to  earn 
money  by  writing.  The  last  time  I  broke  this  in- 
flexible rule  was  when  I  wanted  to  go  to  Europe  to 
see  the  war.  I  did  not  want  to  go  as  a  war-corre- 
spondent, but  merely  as  a  human  being  who  can  see 
things  to  be  as  stupid  as  they  are  without  starving 
to  death.  So  I  decided  to  earn  my  expenses  before 
I  started.  I  approached  one  of  our  popular-maga- 
zine editors  and  said:  "Here,  I  want  to  write  so 
many  dollars'  worth  of  article  for  you  on  such  and 
such  a  subject,  which  I  happen  to  know  about,  and 
I  will  write  it  to  your  order,  any  way  you  want. 
I  will  write  it  first,  and  submit  it,  and  you  will  tell 


MAGAZINE  WRITING  75 


me  what  is  the  matter  with  it,  and  I  will  go  home 
and  write  it  over  again,  and  so  on  until  you  get 
exactly  what  you  want.    I  guarantee  satisfaction." 

He  accepted  my  offer,  and  I  wrote  an  article  and 
read  it  to  him.  He  told  me  it  was  "no  good,"  and 
told  me  why.  I  threw  it  away  and  wrote  another 
on  the  same  subject.  He  liked  one  or  two  para- 
graphs. I  saved  those  and  wrote  another  article 
around  them.  He  liked  all  but  a  few  paragraphs. 
I  cut  those,  and  wrote  more  to  his  order.  He 
accepted  my  article,  and  I  took  my  money  and 
left. 

When  I  came  home  from  Europe  my  friends 
gathered  round  with  a  sad  expression,  and  asked  me 
what  was  the  matter  with  my  writing. 

'That  article  doesn't  have  any  quality,"  they 
said.  "It  is  just  well  written."  I  told  them  that 
I  had  learned  the  trade. 

There  are  people  who  have  a  genius  so  uni- 
versally charming  that  it  rides  over  all  these  auto- 
matic tendencies  to  a  triumph  at  once  literary  and 
professional — people  like  Peter  Dunne.    Let  us  not 


76         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

bother  with  these  exceptions.  We  are  talking 
about  the  generality  of  gifted  young  men  and 
women  who  aspire  so  nobly  to  the  literary  art,  and 
fall  so  automatically  into  the  magazine  trade.  And 
we  are  talking  also  about  some  exceptional  in- 
dividuals, whose  fall  was  more  distinguished. 
Elbert  Hubbard,  Gouverneur  Morris,  Robert  W. 
Chambers,  Jack  London — but  why  reproach  all  the 
many  writers,  who  themselves  know  that  profession- 
alism has  blighted  the  excellent  genius  of  which  they, 
and  we,  had  once  such  illuminating  hopes?  Let  us 
only  reproach  those  four  I 

Was  it  not  better  for  literature  in  the  days  when 
they  paid  too  little  to  entice  many  of  us  to  write  for 
a  living?  Charles  Lamb  was  a  wise  man.  He 
waited  around  an  accountant's  office  long  enough 
to  draw  a  little  pay-envelope,  and  then  slipped 
quietly  home  and  wrote  whatever  he  pleased.  And 
the  result  was  individual,  exquisite  perfection — un- 
saleable at  large,  but  adored  in  bliss  by  those  who 
love  it. 

Perhaps  it  was  still  better  in  the  earlier  days  when 


MAGAZINE  WRITING  79 


princes  would  pay  a  poet  just  for  existing,  and  let 
him  compose  at  his  fancy.  But  I  do  not  believe  so. 
Art  is  always  in  danger  of  removing  itself  from  real 
life;  and  the  dominant  feature  of  real  life  is  the 
pressure  of  necessity;  and  the  artist,  the  writer, 
ought  to  taste  that,  and  taste  it  strong.  Only  he 
ought  not  to  create  under  the  impulse  of  that  pres- 
sure for  an  insanely  competitive  market.  Charles 
Lamb  was  a  wise  man.  He  took  life  on  its  own 
tragic  terms,  and  he  settled  the  bill.  His  office 
work  was  tedious,  but  his  art  was  the  pure  play  of 
a  complete  spirit. 

So  what  magazine  writing  needs  to-day  is  a 
standard  of  amateurism.  That  is  what  all  art 
needs.  We  cherish  that  standard  in  sport,  where; 
it  does  very  little  good  and  quite  an  amount  of 
harm.  We  deprive  an  Indian  youth  of  the  Olym- 
pian medal  for  all-round  athletics,  because  somebody 
digs  up  a  stale  memory  that  he  once  played  baseball 
in  a  bush-league  for  money,  as  he  had  to.  That  is 
idealism  of  a  kind.  It  is  misplaced  idealism.  It 
ought  to  be  placed  in  the  world  of  art,  where  it 


8o         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


would  just  save  art  from  that  professional  standard- 
ization which  continually  kills  it. 

It  is  appalling  to  reflect  what  the  mere  necessity  of 
earning  a  living  can  do  to  an  English  prose  style. 
If  you  were  offered  $5.00  a  paragraph,  would  you 
divide  your  paragraphs  in  the  broad,  logical  manner 
of  Macaulay?  Well,  for  five  cents  a  word,  you 
will  not  write  words  with  the  weighty  brevity  of 
Emerson  or  Epictetus.  You  will  write  like  an  in- 
dictment clerk.  Here  is  an  example  of  the  way  an 
indictment  clerk  writes: 

"The  specific  charge  against  Mrs.  Mohr  was  that 
she  'did  feloniously  and  with  malice  aforethought 
aid,  assist,  abet,  counsel,  hire,  command  and  pro- 
cure Cecil  Victor  Brown,  George  W.  Healis  and 
Henry  W.  Spellman  to  feloniously  and  with  malice 
aforethought  kill  and  slay  C.  Franklin  Mohr.'  " 

And  the  reason  an  indictment  clerk  writes  that 
way,  is  that  in  the  old  English  law-courts  they  used 
to  pay  the  professional  scribes  so  many  pennies  per 
folio  for  copying  legal  documents.  It  was  not  that 
any  lawyer  ever  wanted  to  express  anything  clearly 


MAGAZINE  WRITING  81 


or  unmistakably.  It  was  simply  that  professional 
scribes  had  to  make  a  living  by  the  word,  and  the 
more  words  there  were,  the  larger  the  living  they 
made.  A  similar,  although  more  subtle  employment 
of  English  is  being  automatically  forced  upon  the 
magazine  writers  of  America  by  the  present  method 
of  estimating  literary  values  in  a  commercial  office. 

The  worst  thing  we  can  say  about  popular  maga- 
zine editors  is  that  they  are  corruptors  of  youth. 
The  whole  commercial  magazine  system  is,  in  fact, 
bent  upon  the  spiritual  ruin  of  talented  young  peo- 
ple with  a  beautiful  ambition.  Here  is  a  sensitive 
young  man  from  Tioga,  Pennsylvania,  who  grew  up 
on  a  farm,  working  around  the  barn  for  his  living, 
but  spending  the  whole  strength  of  his  spirit  for 
perhaps  ten  years  producing  and  perfecting  a  novel 
that  is  an  intense  and  compelling  work  of  art.  He 
sends  it  to  a  publisher,  and  it  is  bought  and  issued, 
and  wins  its  way  with  the  public.  Inside  of  five  days 
this  innocent  youth  receives  a  letter  from  a  magazine 
man  offering  to  pay  his  expenses  down  to  New  York 
to  talk  business.    He  comes,  of  course.    He  is 


82         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


excited  and  happy.  He  never  had  any  money. 
What  he  had  was  high  feeling,  patience,  persistence, 
a  love  of  perfection,  a  spirit  tuned  to  make  melodies 
in  its  contact  with  reality.  This  magazine  man 
grabs  hold  of  him,  stuns  him  with  a  point-blank  offer 
of  a  larger  sum  of  money  than  he  ever  knew  how 
to  think  about,  and  proceeds  to  force  him  to  sit 
down  and  turn  out  another  novel  inside  of  ten 
months,  the  first  three  chapters  to  be  delivered  a 
week  from  next  Wednesday!  That  is  the  way  in 
which  our  magazine  system  is  corrupting  the  literary 
art  of  this  period.  Commercial  mediocrity,  com- 
mercial mutilation,^  commercial  timidity,  commer- 
cial "finish,"  commercial  dilution,  and  above  all 

iWhen  this  essay  was  published  in  a  popular  magazine  the  en- 
tire rhythmical  force  and  meaning  was  removed  from  its  concluding 
paragraph  by  the  magazine-man  in  order  to  make  room  for  a 
picture  of  a  female  middle  wearing  an  "abdominal  reducer"  and  a 
pair  of  "girdle  pants"  made  out  of  rubber,  and  for  sale  at  $6.00 
and  $25.00  a  pair  respectively.  And  yet  the  editor  of  that  magazine 
had  spontaneously  asked  me  to  write  the  article  as  an  attack  on 
this  custom  of  buying  literature  by  the  yard,  and  cutting  and  filling 
holes  with  it  as  though  it  were  a  string  of  homogeneous  cheese- 
cloth.   What  hope  is  there  of  the  other  magazine  editors? 


A  DRAWING  BY  K.  R.  CHAMBERLAIN 


MAGAZINE  WRITING  8j 


the  commercial  tempo  are  incompatible  with  the 
very  spirit  of  creative  art. 

Barring  the  hope  of  some  profound  revolution, 
which  may  give  us  all  a  chance  to  earn  a  quiet,  use- 
ful living  in  a  reasonable  number  of  hours  without 
frenzy,  I  see  no  glories  ahead  for  magazine  litera- 
ture. It  will  continue  to  be  as  it  is.  The  big  cir- 
culation-getters with  a  gift  for  keeping  everything 
interesting  though  ordinary,  will  continue  to  buy  up 
and  dilute  the  best  talents  of  the  country;  a  few 
amateur  magazines,  which  can  not  afford  to  pay  for 
anything,  will  continue  to  exhibit  a  lower  average  of 
talent,  but  a  more  poignant  variety  of  art;  every  once 
in  a  while  a  native  popular  genius  will  ride  over  all 
these  tendencies  of  the  time;  and  so  on,  until  some 
deeper  change  than  any  of  us  can  imagine. 


LAZY  VERSE 


LAZY  VERSE 


JOURNALISM  is  the  unique  literary  achieve- 
ment of  this  age.  And  journalism  has 
brought  some  benefit  to  the  literary  tradition. 
It  has  elevated  lucidity  and  human  interest  to  the 
high  place  of  esteem  where  in  a  democratic  society 
they  belong.  It  has  made  the  laborious  task  of  im- 
itating library  echoes,  in  order  to  get  into  the  Atlan- 
tic Monthly^  unnecessary.  It  has  rendered  book-fed 
and  literarious  writers  as  obscure  as  they  are  tire- 
some. But  journalism  is  not  literature;  it  is  busi- 
ness. And  with  some  accidental  exceptions  the  tend- 
ency of  journalism  to  insert  itself  into  the  place  of 
literature  is  a  disaster  to  the  art  of  writing.  I  am 
thinking  of  the  new  dilute  variety  of  prosy  poetry 
which  is  watering  the  country,  and  in  order  to  sep- 
arate myself  from  those  who  have  any  conventional 
or  technical  prejudice  against  composing  poetry 
without  meter  I  call  it  Lazy  Verse. 


90         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

Amazing  are  the  metaphysical  theories  which 
those  who  produce  this  material  put  up  to  jus- 
tify their  professional  incapacity  for  the  intense 
rhapsodies  of  art.  I  am  not  going  to  dispute  those 
theories,  for  of  all  obvious  rationalizations  of  per- 
sonal inclination,  the  so-called  "sciences"  which  an 
artist  constructs  about  his  art  are  the  most  obviously 
unscientific.  When  a  man  starts  a  school  of  poetry, 
you  can  be  sure  that  he  has  an  impulse  to  create 
something  unique,  but  lacks  the  energic  capacity  to 
sit  down  and  do  it.  Every  great  poem  is  a  school  of 
poetry,  but  it  does  not  issue  circulars  about  itself. 
Futurism,  Imagism,  Vorticism,  the  "Sceptric 
School,"  Polyrhythmic  Poetry — all  these  names,  and 
the  others,  are  efforts  to  compensate  a  sense  of  crea- 
tive inferiority.    So  let  them  pass. 

But  that  poetry  is  more  and  more  being  written 
without  meter,  and  that  in  consequence  more  and 
more  poetry  is  being  written,  and  that  those  who  so 
write  are  most  of  them  convinced  that  they  have 
gained  in  freedom  and  power  to  convey  realizations 
to  the  imagination,  is  a  fact  which  any  true  science 


LAZY  VERSE 


91 


of  poetry  will  have  to  consider.  It  will  have  to  es- 
timate the  motives,  and  weigh  the  values  of  the  "free- 
verse"  tendency  in  general.  I  am  going  to  make 
a  beginning  in  that  direction  by  pointing  out  that  in 
the  majority  of  cases  a  mere  lack  of  energetic  idle 
time,  or  the  habit  of  intense  concentration,  is  the 
motive  to  free  verse,  and  the  only  value  gained  is 
the  journalistic  dilution  which  enables  poetry  to  ex- 
pand and  multiply  and  cover  space,  as  all  the  rest 
of  our  writing  does  in  this  day  of  the  innumerable 
magazines  and  the  enormous  newspaper. 

To  read  William  Blake's  poem  "To  the  Evening 
Star,"  or  to  read  passages  of  the  Psalms,  or  Song  of 
Solomon  in  the  English  Bible,  or  of  Tagore's 
or  Giovannitti's  poems,  is  enough  to  prove  to  any 
one  that  realizations  of  the  utmost  poignancy  can 
be  conveyed  without  meter  by  the  poetic  use  of 
names.  Perceptible  forms  too  can  be  engendered 
in  that  exaltation  in  which  qualities  of  thought  or 
passion  have  as  clear  definition  as  qualities  of  sound. 
Even  the  very  absence  of  form,  and  often  of  inten- 
sity itself,  can  have  poetic  value  in  so  unique  an 


92         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

achievement  as  Walt  Whitman's  "Leaves  of  Grass." 
It  was  necessary  that  some  miraculously  powerful 
poet  should  burst  up  through  the  fine  pages  of  re- 
corded high  passion  with  the  uncouth  realities  of  the 
hours  of  a  man's  every-day  life.  This  could  only 
be  done  with  the  every-day  manners  of  language.  It 
could  only  be  done  irregularly,  verbosely.  It  could 
only  be  done  unsatisfactorily^  for  if  it  were  satisfy- 
ing it  would  not  be  the  unqualified  and  incommen- 
surable reality  that  was  required.  But  persons  who 
have  drunk  the  whole  draught  of  Walt  Whitman's 
poetry  and  realized  that  it  is  an  eternal  achievement 
in  literature,  and  persons  who  think  the  English 
Bible  and  many  other  unmetrical  visions  are  exalted 
poetry,  are  still  entitled  to  find  the  general  tendency 
of  modern  "Free  Verse"  dissolving  and  wearisome 
in  an  extreme  degree. 

There  are  two  kinds  of  people  who  become  in- 
fected with  journalistic  free-verse — poets  and  prose- 
writers.  The  motive  which  brings  prose-writers  to 
this  form  is  the  same  as  the  motive  which  makes 
magazine  editors  fill  prose  full  of  paragraphs,  and 


LAZY  VERSE 


95 


little  sub-heads  that  have  nothing  to  do  with  the 
subject  of  discussion.  It  is  a  business  of  "breaking 
up  the  type."  It  is  a  part  of  the  new  art  of  dis- 
play-advertising. It  makes  the  prose  easy  to  read. 
And  the  necessity  of  that  is  a  direct  outcome  of  the 
fatness  of  the  Sunday  newspaper.  We  live  under 
the  weight  of  so  much  printed  material,  for  the  daily 
absorption  of  which  we  feel  responsible,  that  every 
effort  must  be  made  to  tickle  us  and  kick  us  and  jog 
us  along  so  we  will  get  through  anything  to  the  con- 
clusion. So  far  from  being  a  return  to  primitive, 
naive  or  simple  styles  of  writing,  this  breaking  up 
of  continuity  in  lines  neither  demanded  by  me- 
chanics nor  suggested  by  music,  is  the  height  of 
effort  at  sophisticated  stimulation  of  a  jaded  per- 
ception. 

Poets  write  the  new  free  verse  for  a  more  com- 
plicated series  of  reasons,  the  matrix  of  which  is 
indeed  primitive.  It  is  the  aboriginal  indolence, 
which  if  it  had  been  one  ounce  heavier  would  have 
eliminated  the  necessity  of  our  writing  poetry  at  all, 
or  doing  anything  else  that  pertains  to  energic  civ- 


96         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


ilization.  I  am  speaking  now  of  the  poets  who  have 
passion  and  talent  enough  to  produce  in  their  life- 
times a  few  gems  of  concentrated  expression,  but 
who  have  fallen  in  with  the  flow  of  the  magazines, 
and  accepted  their  fatal  facility  as  the  type  of  lit- 
erature in  our  time.  Another  side  of  this  question 
is  presented  by  the  fact  that  free-verse  advertises  the 
chance  of  poetic  creation  to  many  persons  who  ache 
with  feelings  but  lack  the  agility  of  wit  that  metri- 
cal and  rhymed  excellence  demand.  They  have 
gained  confidence  to  express  themselves  in  poetry, 
and  for  that  all  wise  lovers  of  the  art  will  be  thank- 
ful. But  even  for  them,  now  they  have  made  the 
venture,  it  may  be  that  a  more  rigorous  self-disci- 
pline, though  it  should  not  produce  so  many  poems 
that  were  "all  right,"  would  produce  lines  and 
passages  more  adequate  to  their  passion,  and  more 
stimulating  than  mere  "acceptableness"  to  those  who 
read  them.  At  least  it  is  of  dubious  benefit  to  an 
art  that  more  people  should  undertake  it  merely 
because  its  difficulties  have  been  relaxed  by  an  easier 
convention.    It  used  to  require  a  very  high  combi- 


LAZY  VERSE 


97 


nation  of  faculties  of  heart  and  brain,  with  strong 
concentration  added  to  these,  to  make  a  poem  which 
would  endure  reading  it  all.  To-day  all  one  has  to 
do  is  to  say  something.  And  any  one  who  has  some- 
thing to  say  can  do  that. 

A  person  whom  I  suspected  of  trying  to  propagate 
one  of  those  self-advertising  schools  of  poetry,  by 
calling  some  free-verse  effluvium  "polyrhythmics," 
once  mailed  me  at  my  request  a  loose-sheet  note- 
book, and  I  submit  my  response  as  a  proof  of  this 
statement. 

I  like  this  end-opening  note-book. 

I  would  like  a  side-opening  note-book  too. 

I  find  them  so  yielding  to  poetry, 

So  yielding  also  to  prose, 

Ay,  even  to  polyrhythambics,  the  songs  of  the  parrot-cage, 
So  yielding  and  so  sweet  to  the  assaulting  pen. 
In  hyper-dactyls  and  duck-billed  trochaics  I  will  sing — 
If  you  can  call  that  song  which  is  the  very  soul 
Of  loose-necked  indolence  and  club-headed  slothfulness  of 
being — 

Yes,  even  in  these  vegetable  polypods  of  prosic  poetry 
I  will  put  forth  small  buds  of  thought  and  feeling. 
I  will  celebrate  the  paper  that  I  sing  them  on, 


98         JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

And  ask  you,  by  the  muse  of  mussiness  and  paleness  and  de- 
cline, 

To  send  me  on  another  note-book,  open  at  the  side, 

And  measuring  ten  by  eight ;  for  ten  is  not  too  many  inches, 

Nor  is  eight  too  few, 

To  plant  these  boneless  syllables,  these  molluscs  of  mute 

nature,  on. 
These  water-fat  amorphous  multitudes, 
In  copulating  rows  that  shall  regenerate  unto  infinity, 
And  crowd  the  world  with  stringy  puddles  of  inarticulation, 
Until  red  hells  of  vengeance  like  the  flames  of  poetry 
Arise  in  revolutionary  number. 

Purging  space  and  holy  nature  of  this  slow  and  sleep-en- 
gendering gangrene, 

And  sending  down  to  violent  oblivion  and  intense  decay. 

With  one  last  heaven-searching  scream  that  shall  alone  re- 
main in  memory, 

Their  pusillanimated  authors. 

It  is  not  only  the  ingenuity  of  mind  demanded  to 
construct,  without  awkwardness  and  artificiality,  the 
compelling  forms  of  poetry,  that  is  lacking  in  these 
journalistic  poets;  it  is  that  rhapsodic  trance  of  the 
whole  being  which  makes  those  forms  savagely  as- 
pired to  as  a  war-dance  or  a  hypnotic  drug.  People 
who  declare  that  there  are  "no  new  rhythms"  pos- 


LAZY  VERSE 


lOl 


sible  in  metric  poetry,  are  people  so  neuralized  with 
effete  parlor  civilization  that  their  vital  organs  are 
incapable  of  resounding  to  the  fundamental  trance- 
engendering  stroke  of  the  tom-tom.  They  are  in- 
capable of  hypnosis.  They  are  incapable  of  naively 
falling  asleep  to  dream.  They  do  not  know  what 
fundamental  rhythm  is.  If  they  did,  they  could 
not  but  distinguish  that  in  their  minds  from  the 
superficial  forms  of  phrasal  music  which  an  artist 
inevitably  superimposes  upon  it,  and  they  would 
know  that  just  as  many  phrasal  patterns  are  possible 
in  a  fundamental  rhythmic  trance,  and  a  great  many 
more  probable,  than  in  the  state  of  hyper-sophistical 
intellectual  preciosity  which  they  have  found  out 
how  to  exploit  as  primitive  and  free.  Too  much 
neural  excitation  and  too  little  of  the  booming 
pulse  of  the  blood  is  what  distinguishes  this  freedom 
from  the  freedom  of  the  poet  who  is  lost  in  a  rhap- 
sody of  song.  It  is  easy  to  be  free  by  simply  de- 
clining to  engage  a  medium  offering  a  resistance  of 
its  own;  but  to  be  free  by  virtue  of  the  power  to 
conquer  with  your  passion  everything  that  stands 


102        JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


against  it  in  the  genuine  utilities  of  an  art,  is  a  free- 
dom worthy  of  the  boast. 

To  use  line  division  at  all  is  to  acknowledge  the 
organic  value  to  imaginative  realization  of  the  semi- 
regular  recurrent  stimulus,  out  of  which  in  aboriginal 
recitative  the  forms  of  poetry  arose.  To  use  it  with 
arbitrary  opportunism,  so  that  no  judgment  or 
choice,  human  or  superhuman,  not  even  your  own, 
could  ever  put  your  poem  together  again  if  it  fell 
apart,  is  neither  primitive  nor  free,  nor  interesting, 
but  simply  obtuse.  It  reveals  a  lack  of  sensibility  to 
the  real  quality  of  the  thing. 

In  all  arts  it  is  the  tendency  of  those  who  are  un- 
grown  to  confuse  the  expression  of  intense  feeling 
with  the  intense  expression  of  feeling — which  last  is 
all  the  world  will  long  listen  to.  The  journalistic 
vogue  of  free- verse  encourages  this  kind  of  confusion 
in  poetry.  It  gets  people  to  spend  an  entire  literary 
life  cultivating  an  emotional  personality  instead  of 
cultivating  an  art,  because  there  is  not  enough  re- 
sistance in  the  medium  of  the  art  to  make  it  worth 
going  up  against.    In  order  to  produce  anything 


LAZY  VERSE  105 

which  will  compel  attention  beyond  the  vogue  of  the 
Sunday  paper  and  the  every-day  magazine,  it  is  nec- 
essary to  concentrate  attention  upon  the  making  of 
something,  more  even  than  upon  the  passion  out  of 
which  it  is  made;  and  that  is  one  thing  that  the 
forms  of  rhythmic  poetry  compel  us  to  do.  Having 
the  habit  of  such  effort,  it  is  not  impossible  that  we 
might  on  some  occasion  achieve  one  of  those  formless 
forms,  like  Blake's,  that  are  so  rare  as  to  be  remem- 
bered through  the  centuries.  It  is  not  impossible 
that  we  might  subdue  the  listener  to  our  passion 
without  form  as  well  as  without  metrical  music. 
Nothing  can  be  declared  impossible  to  the  whims  of 
the  artistic  impulse.  But  the  general  deliquescence 
of  all  high-strung  and  concentrated  expression  which 
the  journalistic  commerce  of  our  time  is  accomplish- 
ing can  be  declared  incompatible  with  the  whole 
spirit  of  art.  And  that  any  writer  living  in  this 
wide  stream  of  watery  verbal  emotion  can  learn  to 
produce  great  poetry  by  pouring  these  long  verses 
into  that  stream,  can  be  declared  tragically  doubtful. 


WHY  ENGLISH  DOES  NOT  SIMPLIFY 
HER  SPELLING 


WHY  ENGLISH  DOES  NOT  SIMPLIFY 
HER  SPELLING 


SOME  people  like  to  reform  everything  they 
can  get  their  hands  on.  Others  want  to  fold 
away  and  worship  whatever  is  presented  to 
them  by  the  caprice  of  history.  The  world  is  pretty 
evenly  divided  between  these  two.  And  if  only 
Creation  had  thought  to  make  all  the  radicals  red  and 
all  the  conservatives  white,  it  would  have  been  a  great 
convenience.  For  there  is  no  use  in  trying  to  estimate 
a  man's  opinions  until  you  discover  to  which  of  these 
fundamental  schools  he  belongs.  If  he  belongs  to 
the  reds,  you  take  everything  that  he  says  with  a 
grain  of  salt,  and  make  up  for  not  following  his 
advice  by  enjoying  his  company.  If  he  belongs  to 
the  whites,  you  take  what  he  says  (with  all  due  re- 
spect for  his  gray  hair  and  family  connections)  with 
a  grain  of  pepper.    Perhaps  the  drift  of  these  re- 


no       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


marks  will  reveal  the  fact  that  I  am  a  red.  I  like 
to  meddle  and  tinker.  I  would  rather  go  from  bad 
to  worse  than  let  well  enough  alone.  I  belong  to 
that  disreputable  class  damned  by  Tacitus  (or  Cicero, 
or  somebody  who  understood  both  Latin  and  human 
nature)  as  "desiring  a  revolution  for  its  own  sake." 
To  such  persons  everything  very  obviously  needs 
a  change,  and  the  only  question  with  them  is 
whether  they  have  time  to  give  the  revolution  their 
personal  supervision.  Instead  of  introducing  my- 
self, therefore,  as  the  other  debaters  upon  simplified 
spelling  do,  by  wagging  a  long  tail  of  university  de- 
grees, I  give  this  more  relevant  information  that 
I  am  a  red,  and  that  what  I  say  about  anything 
organized  or  established  is  generally  taken  at  a  con- 
siderable discount. 

Such  being  my  nature,  I  instinctively  defend  the 
Simplified  Spelling  Board.  Its  critics  ought  to  re- 
member that  its  motives  are  complex,  like  the  motives 
of  human  beings.  It  is  not  reforming  the  language 
with  a  special  view  to  spelling-books,  or  printing- 
presses,  or  international  diplomacy,  or  phonetics,  or 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  in 

logic,  or  historic  truthfulness;  it  is  moved  by  all 
these  considerations  at  once.  To  reform  a  thing 
means  to  make  it  better  than  it  was ;  and  in  order  to 
make  a  language  better,  it  is  necessary  that  all  human 
interests  be  considered.  The  Spelling  Board  is  try- 
ing to  consider  them  all.  Somehow  it  has  got  stuck 
in  the  popular  mind  that  the  chief  purpose  of  this 
reform  is  to  make  it  easy  for  the  Germans  to  learn 
our  language,  so  that  we  will  not  have  to  learn 
theirs.  That  is  one  very  important  consideration; 
but  there  are  others  just  as  important.  "Historical 
Propriety,  Scientific  Regularity  and  Practical  Econ- 
omy," says  their  last  bulletin.  These  three.  And 
the  greatest  of  these  is  Practical  Economy — which 
divides  itself  into  economy  in  printing  and  writing 
and  typewriting  (five  per  cent,  of  our  letters  being 
considered  superfluous),  economy  of  eye-strain,  econ- 
omy of  paper,  economy  of  time  spent  by  teachers  and 
pupils  (generously  calculated  at  about  a  year  for 
every  pupil).  We  can  save  a  good  deal  of  money 
out  of  what  we  are  spending  for  education  and  put 
it  into  battleships.    Practical  Economy  is  the  chief 


112       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


motive.  But  the  others  are  there — ''Historical  Pro- 
priety," which  some  think  is  the  only  valid  reason 
for  anything,  and  "Scientific  Regularity,"  which  will 
make  it  possible  for  a  child  to  reason  out  his  own 
spellings.  He  will  not  so  soon  get  the  idea  that 
education  consists  of  being  told.  That  is,  to  my 
revolutionary  mind,  the  most  important  argument  in 
favor  of  rationalizing  our  spelling.  But  no  one  of 
these  arguments  does  all  the  work.  The  members 
of  the  Committee  use  them  all.  They  try  to  strike 
a  liberal  attitude  which  will  yield  the  highest  values 
in  each  direction.  When  "Practical  Economy"  gets 
tired,  they  fall  back  on  "Historical  Propriety." 
When  that  wears  out,  they  hitch  up  "Scientific  Reg- 
ularity." So  you  can  generally  suspect,  when  you 
see  one  of  these  arguments  laid  off,  that  the  others 
are  working. 

It  was  a  great  joke,  I  thought,  that  the  Board 
should  fancy  they  were  simplifying  things  when  they 
took  a  few  verbs  that  ended  in  ed  in  the  past  tense, 
and  changed  that  ending  to  /.  When  you  once  learn 
that  English  verbs  form  their  past  in  ed,  it  is  no  sim- 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  113 


plification  to  have  to  remember  that  some  of  them 
cut  it  down  to  /.  Ending  in  ed  in  the  past  was  about 
the  only  consistent  and  respectable  thing  that  English 
verbs  ever  did.  Now  that  is  gone,  and  we  have  a 
new  exception  on  our  hands.  It  used  to  be  very 
smart  to  laugh  at  this  "simplification" — but  that 
was  before  you  read  the  bulletins.  After  you  read 
them,  you  found  out  that  "Scientific  Regularity" 
was  not  on  the  job  there  at  all.  It  was  "Practical 
Economy" — eye-strain,  ink,  paper,  typewriters' 
fingers,  proofreaders'  nervous  system — with  "His- 
torical Propriety"  bossing  the  reform. 

Of  course  it  is  a  little  amusing  to  the  man  who  is 
not  doing  the  work,  to  see  a  reformer  get  into  trouble. 
After  they  get  all  those  900  long-tailed  preterites  in 
ed  docked,  then  they  have  to  go  to  work  and  lay  out 
a  new  museum  of  exceptions. 

"Verbs  that  end  in  -ce  {-ace,  -ice,  -ance,  -ence,  etc.)  in  the 
infinitive  cannot  have  the  d  in  the  preterit  ending  -ced  sim- 
pUfied  to  t,  because  the  resuhant  sequence  -ct  would  be 
abnormal  for  the  sound  intended. 

"The  -ed  cannot  be  spelled  -t  when  the  infinitive  con- 
tains a  long  vowel  written  a — e  (bake),  e.  .e  (eke),  etc.,  etc." 


114       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

These  exceptions  make  you  sick  with  the  old  black- 
board sickness.  This  is  where  the  language  kicks 
back.  It  won't  rationalize.  Nothing  will.  It  is 
the  same  way  with  the  universe.  Every  once  in  a 
while  a  philosopher  sets  out  to  reform  the  universe, 
and,  for  every  new  rule  he  puts  up,  the  universe  comes 
back  with  another  batch  of  exceptions.  The  raw 
material  can  always  raise  you  one  higher,  so  to  say, 
and  that  gives  zest  to  the  intellectual  game.  So 
it  is  with  these  grammatical  exceptions.  You  could 
not  eliminate  them  entirely,  even  if  you  had  the 
remodelling  of  the  human  gullet.  The  object  is, 
however,  to  reform  the  universe  just  all  it  can  stand, 
but  never  forget  that  it  was  there  first  and  you 
have  to  keep  your  eyes  open. 

Now  there  is  one  direction  in  which  the  Simplified 
Spelling  Board  has  not  kept  its  eyes  open.  One 
vital  human  interest,  their  bulletins  of  apology  and 
exegesis  never  mention.  I  am  not  excited  about  it 
because  I  believe  it  will  take  its  revenge.  It  will 
reform  the  reformation.  But  I  take  pleasure  in 
pointing  it  out,  because  this  is  the  first  time  I  ever 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  iij 


discovered  in  my  own  mind  anything  like  a  conserva- 
tive bias. 

In  an  age  which  reduces  all  things  to  the  so-called 
"practical  test,"  we  are  prone  to  forget  that  a  thing 
is  practical  only  because  it  leads  to  an  increase  of 
some  value  which  is  not  practical,  but  enjoyed  for 
its  own  sake.  If  we  are  going  to  make  our  language 
practical,  we  change  it  in  such  a  way  as  to  make 
it  more  useful  to  us  in  getting  those  things  which 
we  want,  not  because  they  are  useful,  but  just  be- 
cause we  want  them.  There  is  no  use  saving  money 
on  schools,  for  instance,  unless  we  can  use  it  for 
something  that  we  like  better.  And  one  of  the  things 
that  we  like,  not  because  it  is  useful,  but  just  be- 
cause we  like  it,  is  literary  art.  A  great  many  of 
the  truest  and  best  Americans  are  vitally  interested 
in  literary  art.  To  them  words  have  a  value,  not 
for  what  they  can  do  only,  but  for  what  they  are. 
As  one  of  the  chief  values  in  literary  art  is  variety 
(in  the  sound,  appearance  and  associations  of  words), 
and  as  the  work  of  the  Spelling  Board  is  an  assault 
on  the  unparalleled  varieties  of  the  English  language, 


ii6       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


it  is  right  for  artists  to  demand  that  the  Board  have 
an  eye  to  this  interest.  Looking  through  their  pub- 
lications, however,  I  find  not  the  scantest  allusion 
to  the  subject. 

In  one  of  their  circulars,  after  congratulating  them- 
selves upon  the  support  of  scientists,  they  proceed  as 
follows : 

"On  the  other  hand,  the  most  vociferous  of  our  oppo- 
nents have  been  men  of  letters.  It  is  pleasant  to  record  that 
many  of  the  foremost  figures  of  contemporary  American 
literature  can  be  counted  as  ardent  advocates  of  our  cause. 
But  it  is  indisputable  also  that  some  writers  of  prominence 
have  revealed  themselves  as  tied  fast  in  the  bonds  of  prej- 
udice and  as  glorying  in  their  enslavement.  Perhaps,  how- 
ever, this  is  to  be  wondered  at  less  than  it  is  to  be  deplored, 
since  it  is  the  duty  of  the  lyrists  and  of  the  romancers  to 
use  the  language  as  best  they  can,  and  they  are  under  no 
obligation  to  acquaint  themselves  with  its  history  or  with 
the  principles  which  govern  its  growth." 

That  paragraph  is  not  very  profound.  Men  of 
letters  are  just  as  prejudiced  as,  and  perhaps  a  little 
more  ignorant,  than,  anybody  else;  but  they  are 
human  beings  too,  and  as  such  the  prime  fact  about 


A  HUSBAND. 

"by  god,  MARIA,  I  BELIEVE  WEVE  BUSTED  THIS  UMBRELLA ! 

GEORGE  BELLOWS 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  119 


them  is  that  they  are  interested  in  their  own  inter- 
ests. They  are  under  no  obligation  to  acquaint 
themselves,  it  says,  with  the  history  of  the  language 
or  the  principles  that  govern  its  growth.  Indeed, 
they  are  not;  and  neither  is  any  scientist,  or  type- 
writer, or  proofreader,  or  schoolma'am,  or  steel 
manufacturer,  or  politician — nobody,  in  fact,  but  a 
few  blue-spectacled  lexicographers  and  close-eyed 
root-ferrets  who  make  their  living  that  way.  They 
can't  reform  the  language.  The  language  will  be 
reformed,  if  it  is  reformed,  by  a  great  army  of  per- 
sons whose  differing  interests  are  all  subserved  by  the 
change,  and  the  "Historical  Propriety"  people  are  an 
exceedingly  insignificant  squad  in  that  army.  Men 
of  letters — especially  the  more  subtle — do  not  be- 
long to  that  army,  because  they  are  (like  men  of 
everything  else)  "tied  fast  in  the  bonds  of  prejudice" 
in  favor  of  the  things  that  they  like  best. 

Men  of  letters  are  not,  as  a  rule,  primarily  in- 
terested in  any  one  of  those  reliable  old  shifts — 
scientific  regularity,  historical  propriety,  or  practical 
economy.    They  are  working  a  different  vein.  They 


120       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


make  their  living,  if  they  can,  out  of  psychological 
variety,  and  that  is  what  they  are  hunting  for.  To 
condemn  them  because  they  are  not  interested  in 
extricating  European  immigrants  from  the  spelling- 
book,  or  smoothing  down  typewriters,  or  saving 
school  money  in  order  to  emphasize  the  gestures  of 
our  navy,  is  as  irrational  as  to  condemn  a  natural- 
born  red  for  wanting  to  revolutionize  the  language. 
They  can't  help  it. 

Now,  to  be  fair  to  that  quotation,  I  will  explain 
what  the  writer  meant  by  saying  that  literary  objec- 
tors are  tied  fast  in  the  bonds  of  prejudice  and  glory- 
ing in  their  enslavement.  He  meant  that  they  are 
unwilling  to  give  up  the  word-values  and  word-as- 
sociations which  they  like,  simply  from  habit,  for 
others  which  are  just  as  good,  but  which  are  un- 
familiar to  them.  For  instance,  if  you  are  a  literary 
man,  the  word  debt  (spelled  with  a  ^)  will  have  a 
special  value  for  you  and  a  great  many  rich  associa- 
tions. You  have  got  used  to  the  and  the  word 
will  not  fit  comfortably  into  a  page  without  it.  It 
will  not  have  just  the  same  feeling- tone.    But  the 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  121 


Spelling  Board  believes  it  is  your  duty,  in  the  in- 
terests of  other  trades,  to  drop  the  b  and  get  used  to 
the  new  form,  which  is  just  as  good  in  itself,  and 
which  will  soon  begin  to  carry  all  the  associations 
that  the  old  one  carried.  In  that  particular  case  the 
Spelling  Board  may  be  right.  A  great  deal  of  the 
opposition  to  any  reform  arises  from  the  selfishness 
of  people  who  refuse  to  change  their  old  habits  for 
new  ones  that  are  just  as  good  for  them,  and  better 
for  somebody  else.  On  the  other  hand,  it  is  very 
difficult  to  decide,  in  a  given  case,  whether  you  are 
objecting  to  a  new  form  just  because  it  does  not  bear 
the  old  associations  yet,  or  because  it  is  by  its  in- 
trinsic nature  not  fit  to  bear  them.  It  is  difficult  to 
say  whether  passiv  (with  that  abrupt  and  g}^mnastic 
ending)  is  unfit  for  the  poetic  representation  of  in- 
activity, or  whether  it  merely  seems  unfit  because  we 
are  accustomed  to  slide  off  on  an  -ive.  It  is  difficult 
to  distinguish  the  judgments  of  custom  from  the 
judgments  of  reason,  but  this  is  a  very  general  in- 
firmity, and  it  is  not,  like  ignorance,  peculiar  to 
men  of  letters. 


122       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


A  man  of  letters,  essaying  to  write  gruesome  poety, 
who  should  leave  the  h  out  of  ghost  and  aghast  and 
ghastly  and  ghostly^  and  the  w  out  of  wraith,  and 
change  the  re  of  spectre  to  an  er  would  be  a  fool. 
He  would  deservedly  die  of  starvation.  A  ghost 
without  an  h  is  little  better,  for  the  purposes  of 
poetry,  than  a  goat.  The  h  not  only  is  connected 
by  custom  with  the  breathless  and  visionary  moment, 
but  for  obvious  reasons  it  ought  to  be.  The  word 
ghost  is  not  at  present  associated  with  post  and  most 
and  roast  and  toast,  and  a  host  of  daylight  experi- 
ences, and  it  is  essential  to  the  literary  art  that  it 
should  not  become  so.  It  is,  with  one  or  two  others, 
a  word  by  itself — a  strange  word,  essentially  unpro- 
nounced,  unmuscularized,  supernatural. 

A  member  of  the  Simplifying  Board  brings  for- 
ward, with  the  gusto  of  a  bull  routing  the  antiques 
out  of  a  china-shop,  a  long  parade  of  words  that  con- 
tain a  needless  A,  thrust  in  by  Caxton  "after  a  Dutch 
fashion" — ghuest,  ghittar,  ghospel,  ghossip,  etc. — 
triumphantly  pointing  to  the  fact  that  we  have  got 
rid  of  this  "awkward  squad,"  and  apparently  won- 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  123 


dering  why  ghost  and  its  companions  remain.  Per- 
haps if  the  writer  had  a  little  more  sympathy  with 
the  growers  of  language,  with  some  less  knowledge 
about  its  growth,  he  would  be  just  as  wise.  "In 
Italian,"  he  says,  "  'hard'  g  before  e  or  i  is  written 
gh^  in  French  gu;  but  these  devices  are  not  needed  in 
English."  If  they  are  not  "needed,"  it  is  the  more 
creditable  to  the  artists,  the  true  developers  of  the 
written  language,  that  they  were  retained.  It  is  the 
more  creditable  to  them  that  they  could  tell  the  es- 
sential difference  between  a  gossip  and  a  ghost. 
"After  a  Dutch  fashion,"  says  he,  with  fine  scorn. 
Whereas  it  is  the  pride  and  glory  of  the  old  Anglo- 
Saxon  drift  that  it  knew  just  where  and  when  to 
borrow  a  jewel  and  slough  off  a  scab.  Every  Con- 
tinental nation  has  been  robbed  of  its  most  intimate 
peculiarities.  Asia  and  the  treasuries  of  Ind  have 
been  levied  upon.  There  is  that  word  wraith^  a 
jewel  to  me  since  childhood,  a  word  to  whose  his- 
torical propriety  and  scientific  regularity  and  prac- 
tical economy  I  dwell  in  a  most  serene  and  blissful 
indifference,  but  a  word  borrowed,  I  know,  by  the 


124       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

happy  genius  of  the  English  people  from  some  travel- 
ling caravan  of  foreigners  or  fates.  The  man  that 
desecrates  such  a  syllable,  a  unity  and  a  symbol  of 
evanescence,  like  the  half-uttered  breath  of  a  spirit, 
is  the  mortal  enemy  of  all  artists.  Be  he  red  or 
white,  their  ways  part  before  the  altar  of  poetry. 

Not  only  is  that  word  a  jewel  because  of  its  sug- 
gested sound  and  its  appearance,  both  essentially 
depending  upon  the  w,  but  it  is  precious  for  two 
other  reasons.  One  of  these  is  its  uniqueness. 
There  is  nothing  else  in  the  world  like  it,  and  there 
shall  never  be.  The  other  reason  is  that  its  verbal 
and  literal  associates  are  totally  different  from  what 
they  would  be  if  the  w  were  omitted.  It  would  be 
one  of  a  vulgar  company — raU,  raid,  rain,  etc. — 
without  its  unutterable  beginning,  whereas  with  that 
beginning  it  is  as  little  like  any  of  those  words  as 
the  vision  itself  might  be.  It  is  potentially  asso- 
ciated with  why  and  whither  and  where,  words  of 
hesitation  and  wonder. 

To  many  who  cannot  feel  a  word,  or  who  feeling 
it  cannot  believe  that  their  feeling  depends  upon  such 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  125 

trivial  things,  these  will  seem  the  refinements  of 
decadence.  The  sound  of  a  word,  they  will  think, 
ought  to  be  enough  to  satisfy  a  healthy  poet.  That 
the  sound  is  by  no  means  unique  in  importance,  how- 
ever, any  one  may  demonstrate  to  himself  by  com- 
paring the  flavor  of  two  such  words  as  rough  and  ruff. 
Not  only  the  appearance,  either,  determines  the  dif- 
ference, but  very  largely  the  muscular  sensations  of 
the  throat  and  mouth.  I  venture  to  say  that,  were 
our  ears  subtly  aware  of  the  finest  overtones,  we 
should  find  those  words  differently  pronounced.  Our 
muscular  sense  is  aware  of  the  finest  overtones. 
Rough  is  a  very  different  word  from  ruff,  aside  from 
its  meaning,  to  the  most  practical  man.  To  me,  as 
it  happens,  rough  is  more  sharply  distinguished  from 
ruff  than  it  is  from  bough,  the  appearance  being 
more  effective  in  that  case  than  the  sound. 

As  the  name  of  so  fine  and  healthy  an  artist  as 
Mark  Twain  is  advanced  upon  the  side  of  simplifi- 
cation, I  appeal  upon  the  question  of  the  importance 
of  these  subtleties  to  a  literary  man  of  our  times  who 
almost  rivalled  him  in  popularity — Robert  Louis 


126       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


Stevenson.  I  can  find  nothing  to  quote  which  quite 
indicates  his  views  on  a  spelling  reform;  but  I  take 
that  essay,  "On  Some  Technical  Elements  of  Style 
in  Literature,"  for  assurance  that  he  believed  in 
the  indispensability  of  subtle  differences,  not  only  in 
the  sounds  of  words,  but  in  their  shape,  and  alpha- 
betic associations,  and  size,  and  velocity,  and  grace. 
I  quote  a  few  significant,  although  not  strictly  ap- 
posite, words.  The  whole  essay  is  apposite  enough 
in  the  subtle  perceptions  which  it  reveals. 

"And  you  will  find  another  and  much  stranger  circum- 
stance. Literature  is  written  by  and  for  two  senses:  a  sort 
of  internal  ear,  quick  to  perceive  'unheard  melodies';  and 
the  eye,  which  directs  the  pen  and  deciphers  the  printed 
page.  Well,  even  as  there  are  rhymes  for  the  eye,  so  you 
will  find  that  there  are  assonances  and  alliterations.  .  .  . 
Here,  then,  we  have  a  fresh  pattern — a  pattern,  to  speak 
grossly,  of  letters — which  makes  the  fourth  preoccupation 
of  the  prose-writer,  and  the  fifth  of  the  versifier.  At  times 
it  is  very  delicate  and  hard  to  perceive,  and  then  perhaps 
most  excellent  and  winning." 

For  further  evidence  that  the  perception  of  these 
hues  and  flavors  is  not  an  hypertrophy  of  the  literary 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  127 


organ,  observe  this  remark  of  an  artist  in  another 
field: 

"And  if  we  have  lost  so  many  things,  which  in  some 
cases  are  lost  forever,  of  what  seemed  to  the  makers  of 
works  of  art  in  the  past  the  very  essence  of  their  difference 
from  other  people,  what  other  things  do  we  not  lose  when, 
for  example,  in  poetry  the  exact  quality  of  a  single  vowel, 
its  shading  in  the  scale  of  sound,  has  so  much  expression, 
so  much  importance  to  us*?  Think  of  all  the  combinations 
of  these  simple  elements  in  the  style  of  a  great  poet.  Each 
syllable  has  a  personality  of  its  own.  .  .  ."  * 

Even  a  person  of  "scientific  regularity"  is  con- 
strained to  recognize  the  visual  and  kinetic  values 
of  words,  as  appears  in  this  passage  from  a  recent 
work  upon  the  "Psychology  of  Beauty" : 

"Manifold  may  be  the  implications  and  suggestions  of 
even  a  single  letter.  Thus  a  charming  anonymous  essay 
on  the  word  'grey.'  'Grey  is  a  quiet  color  for  daylight 
things,  but  there  is  a  touch  of  difference,  of  romance  even, 
about  things  that  are  grey,'  etc." 

Without  looking  farther  for  proofs  of  good  health 
and  sanity,  I  will  endeavor  to  set  forth,  with  what 

*John  La  Farge,  "Considerations  on  Painting." 


128       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


scientific  regularity  I  can  myself  muster,  the  various 
effects  of  the  proposed  simplification  upon  the  lan- 
guage as  artistic  material. 

The  first  of  these  effects  is  the  mutilation  of  many 
words  which  have  a  precious  character  by  virtue  of 
silent,  or  so-called  "superfluous"  letters,  (i)  These 
may  be  precious  because  their  present  form  is  like 
their  meaning: 


fragile 

fragil 

thumb 

thum 

numb 

num 

scimitar 

simitar 

scythe 

sithe 

harangue 

harang 

solemn 

solem 

kissed 

kist 

gazelle 

gazel 

(I  choose  a  few  of  these  published  changes  at 
random,  and,  while  some  of  them  may  represent  per- 
sonal prejudice,  a  universal  truth  remains.  For  in- 
stance, the  c  in  scythe  and  scissors  and  scimitar  is 
to  cut  with.) 

The  English  language  is  especially  rich  in  such 
words — termed  "onomatopoetic."  As  words  were 
many  of  them  born  of  the  perception  of  such  analo- 
gies, so  many  of  them  have  been  retained  or  altered 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  131 


by  the  same  instinct.  This  accounts  for  untold 
"superfluous"  or  "illogical"  letters.  Buz  is  very 
good  logic,  but  very  poor  poetry  compared  with  buzz. 
The  b  in  dumb  and  lamb,  so  the  Historical  Propriety 
man  tells  us,  is  "original" ;  the  ^  in  thumb  and  numb 
was  inserted.  But  the  reason  why  all  four  ^'s  are 
there  now,  is  one  and  the  same  reason — namely,  that 
each  is,  in  a  most  delicate  way,  congruous  with  the 
meaning  of  its  word.  It  is  difficult  to  estimate  things 
that  are  so  unseizable  as  these,  their  elusiveness  be- 
ing the  essence  of  their  value.  Like  happiness  it- 
self, and  like  the  motes  before  your  eyes,  when  you 
look  straight  at  them  they  run  away  into  a  corner 
and  are  not.  But  such  gypsy  things  are  most  pre- 
cious. In  these  ways  our  spelling  is  superior  to  the 
spelling  of  French  and  of  German,  and  far  superior 
to  the  spelling  of  Italian  and  Spanish.  The  practi- 
cal economy  man  calls  it  "vicious."  "It  is  unworthy 
of  a  practical  people."  "No  better  example  could 
be  found  of  the  inconsistency  of  human  nature," 
says  he,  "than  the  fact  that  the  most  businesslike  of 
races  has  been  so  long  content  with  the  most  unbusi- 


132       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


nesslike  of  orthographies."  There  is  nothing  incon- 
sistent about  the  practical  economy  man,  however. 
He  is  practical  from  the  front  end  of  his  pamphlet 
to  the  back.  It  is  possible  that  he  sees  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  race  under  the  shadow  of  his  own  nose.  It 
is  possible  that,  if  he  would  look  beyond  his  own 
age  and  province,  he  would  find  the  Anglo-Saxon 
more  notably  artistic  and  intellectual  than  business- 
like. There  is  a  race  or  two  here  that  competes  with 
us  successfully  in  business.  There  is  none  in  litera- 
ture. And  if  he  should  find  any  further  evidence  of 
this  unpractical  bent,  then  the  spelling  could  line  up 
on  the  same  side  of  the  argument.  The  Anglo-Saxon 
race  might  thus  prove  almost  as  consistent  as  the 
economy  man,  for  there  is  no  written  language  more 
worthy  of  an  artistic  people. 

(2)  The  destroyed  words  may  be  precious  be- 
cause their  present  form  makes  them  unique,  whereas 
the  change  reduces  them  to  vulgarity. 

nitre  niter  sylvan  silvan 

mould  mold  rhyme  rime 

although      altho  autumn  autum 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  133 


build  bild 
choir  quire 
guardian  gardian 


campaign  campam 
league  leag 


Let  autumn  stand  for  a  thousand  tone-poems  that 
the  proposed  reform  would  destroy.  Literature  will 
never  relinquish  autumn. 

(3)  Words  may  be  precious,  by  virtue  of  "super- 
fluous" or  "illogical"  letters,  because  these  letters  de- 
termine valued  associations  and  prevent  disastrous 
ones. 


limb  Urn 
courtesy  curtesy 
tongue  tung 


sovereign  soveren 
lamb  lam 


The  words  that  find  themselves,  one  way  or  another, 
in  this  list  are  innumerable.  You  can  do  what  you 
like  with  phthisis,  and  eggs,  and  cyclopczdias,  and 
hcematins  (whatever  they  are),  but  when  you  try  to 
make  courtesy  into  an  American  there  is  a  kind  of 
folly  in  the  effort.  Courtesy  belongs  to  the  leisure 
of  the  court;  it  would  die  after  two  days  in  a  curt 
atmosphere.    No  music  would  ever  flow  from  a 


134       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 


tung;  it  could  proceed  as  well  from  the  lung^  and 
it  never  has  in  the  history  of  metaphor.  And  when 
it  comes  to  trying  to  make  a  lamb  lam^  all  poetry  and 
religion  protest.  A  lamb  can't  lam.  He  is  too 
blunt.  You  might  as  well  try  to  make  a  cow  scream 
as  to  make  a  lamb  lam. 

It  will  be  noticed,  further,  that  most  of  the  words 
quoted  belong  to  more  than  one  of  these  three  lists. 
Some  belong  to  all  three.  And  in  this  connection  I 
cannot  forbear  to  return  to  the  word  choir.  "Where 
the  stars  choir  forth  eternal  harmonies" — sings  to  me 
from  an  old  translation  of  Bruno,  a  phrase  of  which 
choir  is  the  vital  spirit.  Choir  is  a  word,  so  far  as  I 
can  remember,  absolutely  unique,  a  word  without  any 
poor  relations.  Quire,  on  the  other  hand,  besides  a 
distinctly  papery  feeling  of  its  own,  has  a  whole  rab- 
ble of  disreputable  low  Latin  verbs  coming  after  it. 
The  stars  could  never  stoop  to  it.  "Choir,"  says 
the  historical  propriety  man,  "is  one  of  the  worst 
spellings  in  the  English  language.  It  is  a  blunder- 
ing mixture  of  the  modern  French  spelling  chceur 
with  the  real  English  spelling  quire''    Let  us  thank 


PHILOSOPHER  -  ON  "  THE  "  ROCK:  "  GOSH,  BUT  LITTLE  KIDS  IS  HAPPY  WHEN 
THEy's  young!"       GEORGE  BELLOWS 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  137 


God  that  we  are  blundering  Anglo-Saxons.  We  do 
not  see  the  English  language  through  propriety  spec- 
tacles, but  with  the  ignorant  prejudice  of  an  out- 
door eyesight.  I  could  almost  wish  I  were  a  man  of 
letters,  I  am  so  glad  that  I  am  not  the  historical 
propriety  man.    Choir  stays  in  my  vocabulary. 

But  to  proceed  with  scientific  regularity,  there  is 
another  effect  (4)  which  simplified  spelling  has  upon 
the  literary  material :  it  improves  certain  words  in 
the  same  three  ways  I  have  mentioned. 


riskt  risked 
stampt  stamped 


gipsy  gypsy 
dipt  clipped 


I  do  not  classify  these  examples  and  spread  them  out 
and  make  a  show  of  them,  partly  because  I  have  de- 
veloped a  prejudice  against  the  Simplifiers  since  I  re- 
called their  last  desecration,  and  partly  because  there 
are  not  enough  examples.  It  is  obvious  that  a  move- 
ment toward  uniformity  will  tend  to  destroy  rather 
than  enhance  associations  and  individualities;  and 
it  is  obvious  to  one  who  knows  how  much  onoma- 
topoeia has  influenced  the  development  of  our  Ian- 


138       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

guage  that  any  logical  and  economical  reprisals  upon 
it  would  tend  to  destroy  these  cherished  fabrics.  In 
those  words  ending  in  /  the  gains  and  losses  are  about 
even.  For  instance,  Whitman  (who  will  not  be  ac- 
cused of  super-refinement)  gained  a  similar  flavor  by 
writing,  "Hush'd  be  the  camps  to-day."  The  hush 
actually  occurs  at  that  moment.  And  so  it  is  with 
dipt  and  dipt^  etc.^  But  kist  is  altogether 
wrong.  It  would  do  for  a  parlor  encounter  with  an 
aunt. 

In  poetry  sometimes  we  linger  and  sometimes  we 
jump,  but  in  "practical  economy"  we  are  always  on 
the  jump.  A  spare  and  naked  line  has  a  unique 
beauty — a  line  like  this  one  of  Shelley's,  without  a 
superfluous  ounce  for  the  eye  or  ear: 

"But  list,  I  hear 
The  small  clear  silver  lute  of  the  young  spirit 
That  sits  on  the  morning  star." 

1  From  a  literary  standpoint  it  is  desirable,  within  limits,  to  have 
a  choice  between  two  or  more  forms,  and  especially  has  this  been 
appreciated  in  the  case  of  past  tenses.  Keats  uses  the  /  and  the  *d 
and  the  ed,  and  it  is  undoubtedly  a  gain  to  be  set  more  free  in  this 
respect  by  the  Simplifiers. 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  139 


But  a  language  that  was  committed  throughout  to 
that  style  would  be  poor  indeed : 

"Season  of  mists  and  mellow  fruitfulness !" 
"Seson  of  mists  and  mello  f rutfulness  !"  ^ 

(5)  The  final,  and  possibly  most  important,  effect 
of  the  simplification  would  be  the  loss  of  variety  it- 
self. The  eccentricity  of  a  given  word,  such  as 
through  or  enough^  may  seem  to  have  little  intrinsic 
merit,  but  it  is  of  general  value  to  the  literary  artist 
that  his  material  be  diversified  by  these  venerable 
prodigies.  They  help  him  to  endow  every  phrase 
with  a  separate  character.  For  every  wild  word  or 
bundle  of  words  that  is  trimmed  down  and  fitted  into 
a  group,  another  resource  is  lost  to  the  poet. 

We  boast  that  our  language  is  not  second  to  Greek 
in  its  power  of  conveying  subtle  impressions;  and  a 
great  part  of  this  power  rests  in  the  infinite  number 
of  phrase  combinations  possible.  The  Simplifiers  aim 
to  injure  this  power.  An  irreducible  conflict  there- 
fore subsists  between  their  practical,  scientific  and 
commercial  interest  and  the  art  interest  in  our  lan- 
guage, and  that  is  why  men  of  letters  have  been  "the 


HO       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

most  vociferous  opponents."  That  they  are  not  only 
"the  most  vociferous,"  but  that  they  will  prove  also 
the  most  effective,  remains  to  be  pointed  out. 

It  has  already  been  stated  that  aesthetic  judgment 
was  the  sovereign  power  in  developing  and  control- 
ling our  language.  Nothing  else  could  have  steered 
us  through  the  Norman  period,  the  season  of  our  wild 
oats,  the  ecclesiastical  oppression,  the  barbaric  influ- 
ence of  scholars  and  propriety  men,  of  pedants  and 
scientific  regulars,  of  King  Charles's  French  peacocks, 
and  of  the  modern  utility  people.  It  is  the  exquisite 
sensibility  of  the  English  folk  that  has  conveyed  to 
us  through  all  these  hideous  onslaughts  "a  veritable 
power  of  expression,  such  as  perhaps  never  stood  at 
the  command  of  any  other  people."  I  quote  from 
Jacob  Grimm.  "In  wealth,  good  sense  and  closeness 
of  structure,  no  other  of  the  languages  at  this  day 
spoken  deserves  to  be  compared  with  it."  But  if  the 
controlling  interest  has  been  aesthetic  in  the  past,  it 
is  safe  for  the  hopeful  to  assert  that  it  will  continue 
so  in  the  future,  and  that,  therefore,  those  who  de- 
sire that  English  should  become  the  great  language 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  143 


of  the  earth  do  not  begin  wisely  by  making  an  as- 
sault upon  its  wealth.* 

The  impulse  of  ordinary  childlike  people  is  to  cling 
to  that  thing  which  is  not  good  for  something,  but 
good  in  itself.  And  that  is  why  I  believe  that  the 
artistic  interest  will  reform  the  reformers.  A  few  of 
their  expedients  will  be  chosen,  are  half  chosen  al- 
ready; others  will  remain  long  as  alternative  forms; 
the  language  will  clear  itself  and  limber  itself  some- 
what in  response  to  the  mania  of  expediteness  that 
besets  its  American  cultivators.  The  age  will  leave 
a  characteristic  mark ;  but  it  will  leave,  roughly  speak- 
ing, only  what  is  an  addition  to  the  wealth  and  not 
to  the  practical  economy  of  its  inheritance.  A  type 
of  the  usual  arguments  against  simplification  is  that 
one  which  asserts  that  the  forms  of  words  are  historic 
records  significant  of  the  interests  of  different  ages, 
and  that  therefore  we  should  leave  them  as  they  are. 
But  if  anything  could  be  a  better  historic  record,  or 
more  significant  of  this  age,  than  the  marks  of  vio- 

*  "English  is  remarkable  for  the  intensity  and  variety  of  the  color 
of  its  words.  No  language,  I  believe,  has  so  many  words  specifically 
poetic." — George  Santayana,  in  "The  Sense  of  Beauty." 


144       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

lence  left  by  its  attempt  to  make  the  language  prac- 
tical we  have  yet  to  be  informed  of  it.  Such  marks 
will  undoubtedly  be  left  upon  the  language;  but 
they  will  be  subservient  to  that  general  aesthetic  de- 
velopment which  so  envelops  the  Simplifiers  that 
they  remain  totally  incognizant  of  its  existence. 
The  real  treasurers  of  the  language  are  and  always 
have  been  the  knowers  of  its  immediate  beauty. 

This  is  so  certain  that,  but  for  the  satisfaction  of 
showing  hands  on  the  victorious  side,  it  were  futile 
to  argue  about  it.  With  entire  truth  the  Simplifiers 
point  out  that  their  critics  have  advanced  no  reason 
or  valid  argument  against  them.  This  may  be  be- 
cause the  lovers  of  poetry  are  too  sure  of  her  power  to 
enter  the  lists.  It  may  be  because  they  are  but 
dimly  conscious  of  the  reasons  for  their  choice,  and 
are  confused  between  the  values  that  they  perceive 
to  arise  from  habit  and  those  which  they  know  to 
inhere  in  the  nature  of  the  words.  But,  whatever 
the  cause  of  their  silence,  it  is  clear  that  their  opposi- 
tion to  the  movement  is  arbitrary  and  self-justified 
and  unanswerable.    It  is  a  difference  of  wish. 


SIMPLIFIED  SPELLING  145 


There  is,  however,  an  allied  reason  for  opposing 
the  simplification  which  is  based  upon  an  interest 
common  to  all  parties.  It  is  the  interest  in  demo- 
cratic culture.  You  can  deduce  from  the  examples 
and  quotations  given,  that  our  inheritance  of  poetry 
and  excellent  literature  will  either  survive  in  the  old 
spelling  or  suffer  immense  mutilation.  Reverence 
for  the  classics  is  the  prime  conservative  element  in 
the  growth  of  language.  And  I  believe  that  the 
classics  will  resist  an  arbitrary  and  extensive  change 
in  their  spelling;  they  will  not  be  profitably  pub- 
lished in  the  revised  forms.  If  I  am  right,  it  is  ob- 
vious that  a  great  change  in  the  common  usage  would 
at  once  set  these  monuments  aloft  and  apart  from  our 
everyday  life.  Our  best  literature  could  no  longer 
flow  in  the  minds  of  the  people.  It  would  be  a 
written  language,  the  genius  of  which  would  have  to 
be  learned.  Therefore,  it  would  belong  to  the 
scholars  and  the  leisure  class,  as  Chaucer  already 
does.  That  this  alienation  of  literature  from  lively 
speech  is  a  peril  always  imminent,  needs  no  proof. 
But  the  recasting  of  our  commercial  language  by  a 


146       JOURNALISM  VERSUS  ART 

committee  of  persons  who  acknowledge  nowhere  a 
tittle  of  the  claims  of  art,  is  a  direct  invitation  of  the 
peril.  This  is  proven  when  it  is  confessed  that  the 
Committee  is  chiefly  opposed  by  men  of  letters. 
Either  we  will  mutilate  our  inheritance  or  it  will  re- 
cede from  us;  a  lover  of  poetry  and  democracy  can- 
not accede  to  either  alternative.  And  that  dilemma, 
added  to  an  estimation  of  the  immediate  values  to 
be  lost,  leads  many  even  of  those  who  are  blessed 
with  an  irreverent  and  meddlesome  nature,  to  turn 
their  backs  upon  this  ill-considered  revolution. 


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